Auditory Masking with Complex Stimuli

Abstract

The detection of a target sound embedded in a chaotic acoustical environment is a basic yet poorly understood component of auditory perception. This chapter reviews three aspects of such auditory masking, building toward the important problem of the perception of hearing a speech signal in the presence of competing speech sounds. First, the history of psychoacoustic masking experiments and the development of energy-based models to account for the resulting data are described. Then experiments and models of the detection of a tonal signal masked by randomly drawn maskers, an example of informational masking, are described. Informational masking experiments such as these are important because they reveal masking phenomena that are mediated more centrally than the masking associated with traditional masking studies. Finally, the roles of peripheral and central masking for the detection of speech masked by other speech sounds are discussed.