Broadband sounds decompose into a slow envelope riding a fast temporal fine structure carrier.

Evidence

Within the cochlea, broadband sounds like speech and music are filtered into a series of narrowband signals, each of which can be considered as a relatively slowly varying envelope (ENV) imposed on a rapidly oscillating carrier (the temporal fine structure, TFS). Information about ENV and TFS is conveyed in the timing and short-term rate of nerve spikes in the auditory nerve. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 791

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ENV and TFS as the two components of narrowband cochlear filtering.