A competing tone at another frequency suppresses a cochlea channel’s response

Evidence

There are other deviations from linear and time-invariant behaviour found in the neural responses in addition to the compression of dynamics shown in Figure 7.11. The two most prominent cochlear non-linearities are called two-tone suppression and combination tones. Two-tone suppression is the phenomenon where the addition of a second input tone at another frequency suppresses the activation caused by the test tone at its characteristic frequency (Delgutte, 1990). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 770

Categorization

• DEFINE: Two-tone suppression is defined as one tone suppressing activation at another tone’s characteristic frequency.
• XREF: Explains perceptual masking and how the auditory system enhances spectral peaks over broadband noise.