Adding noise can make listeners hear nonexistent high-frequency brilliance in music.

Evidence

Many music enthusiasts miss the “brilliance” of Caruso’s voice, if the hiss noise is removed completely. In well controlled psychoacoustic experiments it could be shown that, when adding soft white noise to music low-pass filtered at 8 kHz, experts like sound engineers or professional musicians “hear” that the brilliance of the music increases despite the fact that in both presentations with or without soft background noise, the music contains only frequency components up to 8 kHz. Presumably the experts infer that (non-existent) high-frequency components of the music are masked by the added soft noise. On the other hand, the experts preferred the version without noise although they felt that in this version the music material lost its brilliance. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 2026

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the perceptual phenomenon where absent high-frequency content is inferred to be masked by added noise — a hallmark of psychoacoustic inference.
• SEED: Angle for ‘remastering old recordings and what noise actually does to perceived fidelity’ — the tradeoff between audio cleanliness and perceived brilliance.
• XREF: Connects to auditory scene analysis and masking theory concepts familiar from music production and audiophile debates.