Narrowband noise’s natural waveform fluctuations mask the presence of inserted gaps

Evidence

Shailer and Moore (1985) demonstrated that gap detection abilities degraded substantially when the bandwidth of noise was very narrow and less than a critical band. They argued that these very narrow bandwidth sounds have robust fluctuations that can be easily confused with the gap. Figure 5–9 illustrates this idea. The left panel shows the stimulus with its natural fluctuations, and the right panel illustrates that stimulus with a gap inserted. In this figure, the gap is inserted near one of the waveform valleys. One can see that if the gap, as in this case, is presented near or in one of the temporal valleys of the waveform, it would be difficult to detect, particularly in comparison to a gap inserted near a peak. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 984

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete illustration of how intrinsic waveform fluctuations (valleys vs peaks) physically interact with an inserted gap.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 984