The ability to understand speech-in-speech is generally described to be related to the capacity to segregate one auditory stream among others sound sources. The channeling theory suggests that sequential stream segregation is basically sustained by frequency selectivity. However, it has been evidenced that sequences of stimuli that evoked the same ...

Information Technology acoustic protocols include identifying prominent tones according to likely subjective importance. Most existing methods for calculating tone-to-noise ratio (TNR) require a suspect tone to be selected by the analyst, who must also mark the width; both are potential sources of uncertainty and variability. One purpose of this paper ...

Research on the integration of auditory and visual sensory information consistently confirms the optimal integration hypothesis, according to which information is weighted according to its relative quality. Thus, since the auditory system has greater temporal resolution, this hypothesis predicts that visual information will not affect auditory judgments of duration. In ...

Briefly presenting an inducing tone of 70-80 dB can substantially reduce the loudness of a subsequent test tone at or near the inducer's frequency, a phenomenon called Induced Loudness Reduction (ILR). The study of ILR emerged from earlier observations on differential contextual effects in loudness judgment: Tones of a given ...

Segregation of auditory inputs into meaningful acoustic groups is a key element of auditory scene analysis. Previously, we showed that two interwoven sets of tones differing widely along multiple feature dimensions (duration, pitch and location) were pre-attentively separated into different groups, and that tones separated in this manner did not ...

The development and digital waveform synthesis of a multiple-frequency tone-burst (MFTB) stimulus is presented. The stimulus is designed to improve the efficiency of monitoring high-frequency auditory-brainstem-response (ABR) hearing thresholds. The pure-tone-based, fractional-octave-bandwidth MFTB supports frequency selective ABR audiometry with a bandwidth that falls between the conventional click and single-frequency tone-burst ...

This paper presents a new application of the dynamic iterated rippled noise (IRN) algorithm by generating dynamic pitch contours representative of those that occur in natural speech in the context of EEG and the frequency following response (FFR). Besides IRN steady state and linear rising stimuli, curvilinear rising stimuli were ...

In a multiple observation, sample discrimination experiment normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners heard two multitone complexes each consisting of six simultaneous tones with nominal frequencies spaced evenly on an ERB(N) logarithmic scale between 257 and 6930 Hz. On every trial, the frequency of each tone was sampled from a ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate how vocal fundamental frequency control was influenced by the timbre of target auditory stimuli. Nineteen female participants were asked to vocally reproduce the pitch of target tones, which consisted of female, male, violin, and clarinet timbres at three different fundamental frequencies. Results ...

Vibrotactile stimuli can elicit compelling auditory sensations, even when sound energy levels are minimal and undetectable. It has previously been shown that subjects judge auditory tones embedded in white noise to be louder when they are accompanied by a vibrotactile stimulus of the same frequency. A first experiment replicated this ...

Just-noticeable interaural time differences were measured for low-frequency pure tones, high-frequency sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) tones, and high-frequency transposed stimuli, at multiple levels with or without a spectrally notched diotic noise to prevent spread of excitation. Performance with transposed stimuli and pure tones was similar in quiet; however, in noise, performance ...

BACKGROUND: Understanding the time course of how listeners reconstruct a missing fundamental component in an auditory stimulus remains elusive. We report MEG evidence that the missing fundamental component of a complex auditory stimulus is recovered in auditory cortex within 100 ms post stimulus onset. METHODOLOGY: Two outside tones of four-tone ...

Previous research has shown that the detectability of a local change in a visual image is essentially independent of the complexity of the image when the interstimulus interval (ISI) is very short, but is limited by a low-capacity memory system when the ISI exceeds 100 ms. In the study reported ...

Otoacoustic emission (OAE) data recorded for tone bursts presented separately and as a two-tone burst complex, that had been reported previously [Yoshikawa, H., Smurzynski, J., Probst R., 2000. Suppression of tone burst evoked otoacoustic emissions in relation to frequency separation. Hear. Res. 148, 95-106], were re-processed using the method of ...

A pitch-matching paradigm was used to investigate the pitch of three-tone complexes in a college-age population. For different conditions, the central tone was 1,000 Hz with the side tones spaced by either 15 Hz or 45 Hz. The tones were equal intensity or a signal was added in phase to ...

In the unmasking paradigm [W.M. Hartmann and M.J. Goupell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120, 2142-2157 (2006)], removing harmonic n of a periodic complex tone causes harmonic n+1 to be suddenly audible, though sometimes n-1 is heard instead. The unmasking experiment was repeated with harmonically stretched tones, where the frequency of ...

Low-frequency sine tones can have large interaural time differences, but high-frequency tones cannot. If listeners estimate the lateral positions of tones of different frequency, using a fixed lateralization response scale, the estimates may depend on the experimental blocking of the tones. A context where all frequencies appear equally often (mixed) ...

The auditory system can segregate sounds that overlap in time and frequency, if the sounds differ in acoustic properties such as fundamental frequency (f0). However, the neural mechanisms that underlie this ability are poorly understood. Responses of neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) of the anesthetized chinchilla were measured. The ...

We investigated the ability of cats to discriminate differences between vowel-like spectra, assessed their discrimination ability over time, and compared spectral receptive fields in primary auditory cortex (AI) of trained and untrained cats. Animals were trained to discriminate changes in the spectral envelope of a broad-band harmonic complex in a ...

Different types of generation mechanisms of 40-Hz auditory steady-state response (ASSR) were investigated using diotic and dichotic stimulation with 500- and 540-Hz pure tones of 1.0-s duration and 2.0-s stimulus onset asynchrony. When the sum of both tones was presented to both ears simultaneously, they interacted at cochlear level and ...

The effect of stimulus duration on absolute identification of musical pitch was measured in a single-interval 12-alternative forced-choice task. Stimuli consisted of pure tones selected randomly on each trial from a set of 60 logarithmically spaced musical note frequencies from 65.4 to 1975.5Hz (C2-B6). Stimulus durations were 5, 10, 25, ...

Studies have reported compatibility between hearing and electrophysiological thresholds in the auditory brainstem response (ABR) with tone burst stimuli. AIMS: to verify waves I, III, V and their latency times for tone bursts at 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz and at 80 dB HL, and to compare tone burst ...

This study investigated gap duration discrimination (GDD) for frequency-asymmetric gap markers, where one marker was a two-tone complex consisting of a primary tone and a secondary tone, and the other marker was the primary tone alone. Three experiments were undertaken to examine the order effect wherein performance is better when ...

This study investigates the vertical localization of single complex tones (monads) and simultaneous complex tone pairs (dyads), especially as it is affected by their fundamental frequency and source elevation. Two complex tone timbres are considered: one consisting of five low-order harmonics, and the other of all odd harmonics (a square ...

This article reports the first study of the glissando illusion, which was created and published as a sound demonstration by Deutsch [Deutsch, D. (1995). Musical illusions and paradoxes. La Jolla: Philomel Records (compact disc)]. To experience the illusion, each subject was seated in front of two stereophonically separated loudspeakers, with ...

OBJECTIVE: The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the accuracy of cochlear implant recipients who use different types of devices and signal processing strategies on pitch ranking as a function of size of interval and frequency range and (b) to examine the relations between this pitch perception measure ...

A spectral discrimination task was used to estimate the frequency range over which information about the temporal envelope is consolidated. The standard consisted of n equal intensity, random phase sinusoids, symmetrically placed around a signal component. The signal was an intensity increment of the central sinusoid, which on average was ...

The fossil record of the order Carnivora extends back at least 60 million years and documents a remarkable history of adaptive radiation characterized by the repeated, independent evolution of similar feeding morphologies in distinct clades. Within the order, convergence is apparent in the iterative appearance of a variety of ecomorphs, ...

Auditory environments vary as a result of the appearance and disappearance of acoustic sources, as well as fluctuations characteristic of the sources themselves. The appearance of an object is often manifest as a transition in the pattern of ongoing fluctuation, rather than an onset or offset of acoustic power. How ...

Perturbations in either voice pitch or loudness feedback lead to changes in a speaker's voice fundamental frequency (F0) or amplitude. Voice pitch or loudness perturbations were presented individually (either pitch or loudness shift stimuli) or simultaneously (pitch combined with loudness shift stimuli) to subjects sustaining a vowel to test the ...

OBJECTIVES: Temporal envelope and periodicity components (TEPC) in the speech signal have potentials to offer important cues for speech recognition especially in tonal languages. The aims of this study are: (i) to investigate the degree of contributions of TEPC to lexical tone identification in Cantonese; and (ii) to investigate whether ...

The present study was aimed to examine the relationship between psychophysical performance in temporal and spectral resolution and Mandarin tone recognition in noise by cochlear-implant (CI) listeners. Seventeen Nucleus-24 implant users, 10 postlingually deafened and 7 prelingually deafened, participated in the experiments. A 3-interval, forced-choice procedure was used to measure ...

Phenomena resembling tinnitus and Zwicker phantom tone are seen to result from an auditory gain adaptation mechanism that attempts to make full use of a fixed-capacity channel. In the case of tinnitus, the gain adaptation enhances internal noise of a frequency band otherwise silent due to damage. This generates a ...

Tone pulses were presented consecutively to one and the other ear in normally hearing musicians. The frequency of pulses in one, reference ear was fixed. That in the other, test ear varied to achieve the same pitch of tones in both ears. The frequency deviation of the test tone from ...

Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to classify individual pitches without an external referent. The authors compared results from pigeons (Columba livia, a nonsongbird species) with results (R. Weisman, M. Njegovan, C. Sturdy, L. Phillmore, J. Coyle, & D. Mewhort, 1998) from zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata, a songbird species) and ...

Two experiments examined the effect of highly lateralized adaptor tone pulses on the perceived intracranial location of subsequent test tones. In Experiment 1, adaptor tones of each of two frequencies, highly lateralized to opposite sides by a quarter-period interaural time difference (ITD), were found to shift the perceived intracranial location ...

The kappa effect, an effect of spatial extent on the perception of time, is, relatively speaking, poorly understood, especially in the auditory domain. Five experiments demonstrate the kappa effect in the auditory domain by instructing listeners to judge the timing of a tone (Tone X) in relation to a tone ...

BACKGROUND: Decrements of auditory evoked responses elicited by repeatedly presented sounds with similar frequencies have been well investigated by means of electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography (MEG). However the possible inhibitory interactions between different neuronal populations remains poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated the effect of proceeding notch-filtered noises (NFNs) ...

Three previous psychophysical studies have demonstrated that interaural time difference (ITD) coding mechanisms can undergo frequency-specific, selective adaptation. We sought to determine whether this phenomenon extends to the pitch domain, by employing the same psycho-physical paradigm as one used previously, but with harmonic tone complexes lacking energy at the fundamental ...

This paper investigates the relationship between the phonological features of tone and tone perception in Thai. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis (proposed by Morén & Zsiga) that the principle perceptual cues to the five-way tonal contrast in Thai are high and low pitch targets aligned to moras. Results of four ...

This paper describes a study on the effectiveness of expanding the temporal envelope and periodicity component (TEPC) for Cantonese tone perception. The ultimate goal is to develop speech processing techniques that can improve speech perception of hearing prosthesis users. Cantonese is a popular Chinese dialect with a complex lexical tone ...

Thresholds for the discrimination of fundamental frequency (FODLs) and frequency difference limens (FDLs) for individual partials within a complex tone (F0=250 Hz, harmonics 1-7) were measured for stimulus durations of 200, 50, and 16 ms. The FDLs increased with decreasing duration. Although the results differed across subjects, the effect of ...

An experienced car mechanic can often deduce what's wrong with a car by carefully listening to the sound of the ailing engine, despite the presence of multiple sources of noise. Indeed, the ability to select task-relevant sounds for awareness, whilst ignoring irrelevant ones, constitutes one of the most fundamental of ...

Current theories of auditory pitch perception propose that cochlear place (spectral) and activity timing pattern (temporal) information are somehow combined within the brain to produce holistic pitch percepts, yet the neural mechanisms for integrating these two kinds of information remain obscure. To examine this process in more detail, stimuli made ...

It is commonly assumed that one can always assign a direction-upward or downward-to a percept of pitch change. The present study shows that this is true for some, but not all, listeners. Frequency difference limens (FDLs, in cents) for pure tones roved in frequency were measured in two conditions. In ...

Molecular psychophysics attempts to model the observer's response to stimuli as they vary from trial to trial. The approach has gained popularity in multitone pattern discrimination studies as a means of estimating the relative reliance or decision weight listeners give to different tones in the pattern. Various factors affecting decision ...

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that fundamental frequency (fo) discrimination depends on the resolvability of harmonics within a tone complex. Fundamental frequency difference limens (fo DLs) were measured for random-phase harmonic complexes with eight fo's between 75 and 400 Hz, bandpass filtered between 1.5 and 3.5 kHz, and presented at ...

Sequential effects are examined in a cross-modality matching experiment where observers adjusted the loudness of a tone in response to presented lengths of a metal tape. In one condition, the initial level of the tone to be adjusted was the same as the final adjusted level of the previous trial, ...

Adjacent speech, and even nonspeech, contexts influence phonetic categorization. Four experiments investigated how preceding sequences of sine-wave tones influence phonetic categorization. This experimental paradigm provides a means of investigating the statistical regularities of acoustic events that influence online speech categorization and, reciprocally, reveals regularities of the sound environment tracked by ...

Mistuning a harmonic produces an exaggerated change in its pitch. This occurs because the component becomes inconsistent with the regular pattern that causes the other harmonics (constituting the spectral frame) to integrate perceptually. These pitch shifts were measured when the fundamental (F0) component of a complex tone (nominal F0 frequency ...