Maskers in auditory experiments must eliminate amplitude cues to isolate detection accuracy

Evidence

In experiment 2, the target was a pulsed complex tone embedded in a masker. The target was generated by summing three sinusoidal harmonics of a 110-Hz fundamental that were chosen randomly from the range from 220 to 6270 Hz with the constraint that they differed by at least one critical band. The target was modulated with a square wave function (frequency: 4 Hz, duty cycle: 41.7 ms) and its duration was chosen randomly from the interval from 2 to 6 s. The masker was a continuous sequence of random complex tones, each of which was generated by summing three to five sinusoids (depending on the listener’s target detection threshold) with random starting phases and the same amplitude and duration as the target components. The masker components were chosen randomly from the range from 200 to 6297 Hz with the constraint that they differed by at least one critical band from each other and the target components when the latter were present. For intervals when the target was present, overall amplitude cues were eliminated by reducing the number of masker components by the number of target components. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4784

Categorization

• DEFINE: Describes the construction constraints (critical-band separation, amplitude-cue elimination) used to build a proper masking stimulus.