Pulsation patterns can replicate masking patterns to under 1 dB accuracy

Evidence

Whereas the measurement of masking patterns for narrow-band noise represents an easy ta..‘lk for the subject, masking patterns of pure tones are confounded by additional effects such as beats, roughness and combination tones (see Sect. 4.2.1). The following strategy was therefore adopted: for a critical-band wide noise at 2 kHz with 60 dB SPL, both the masking pattern and the pulsation pattern were determined. The temporal features of the stimulus pattern for the pulsation threshold measurement shown in Fig. 4.35 were then varied, until the resulting pulsation pattern matched to the corresponding masking pattern as closely as possible. Figure 4.37a shows that the masking pattern and the pulsation pattern coincide very closely (average deviation is less than 1 dB) when the stimulus pattern was as follows: “masker” duration TM = 100 ms, test-tone duration TT = 100 ms, temporal gap between “masker” and test tone tg = 5 ms, and Gaussian-shaped gating signal TrG = 10 ms. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 598

Categorization

• QUESTION: What causes the beats, roughness and combination tones that confound pure-tone masking measurement, and do they have dedicated models elsewhere? Could chase the mechanism behind why narrow-band noise avoids them.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 598