Modeling the influence of inherent envelope fluctuations in simultaneous masking experiments

Masked thresholds are measured and simulated for bandpass-noise signals ranging in bandwidth from 4 to 256 Hz in the presence of a masking bandpass noise also ranging in bandwidth from 4 to 256 Hz. Signal and masker are centered at 2 kHz. To investigate the role of temporal processing in simultaneous masking, simulations were performed with the modulation-filterbank model by Dau et al. [J. Acoust. Soc Am. 102, 2906-2919 (1997)]. For a fixed masker bandwidth, thresholds are independent of the signal bandwidth as long as the signal bandwidth does not exceed the masker bandwidth and thresholds decrease with increasing masker bandwidth in those conditions. A simple modulation-low-pass filter (energy integrator) would be sufficient to describe the experimental results in those conditions. In contrast, the processing by a modulation filterbank is necessary to account for the conditions of "asymmetry of masking," where thresholds for signals with bandwidths larger than the masker bandwidth are much lower than those for the reversed condition. In those conditions, the modulation-filterbank model is able to use the inherent higher modulation frequencies of the signal as an additional cue.