Spectral masking by loud sounds is exploited to design lossy audio codecs.

Evidence

The inaudibility of soft sounds in the presence of louder sounds is very common in everyday listening scenarios. The phenomenon itself is present in all technical devices aiming to detect a weak signal in the presence of an interfering strong signal. The masking effect is an important characteristic of human hearing, which is commonly exploited in sound and voice technologies, as in the design of lossy audio codecs (see Section 15.3.1). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 990

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s application-focused goal: connects hearing science to a concrete engineering use (MP3/AAC perceptual coding).