Stronger tones in the cochlea actively mask neighboring weaker tones via two-tone suppression.

Evidence

Two-tone suppression is the phenomenon where the addition of a second input tone at another frequency suppresses the activation caused by the test tone at its characteristic frequency (Delgutte, 1990). … This phenomenon can be interpreted as a kind of masking, a means for stronger (and potentially more important) signal components to dominate over neighbouring weaker signal components that may be noise or other interfering sounds. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 772

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to psychoacoustic masking effects relevant to audio compression codecs like MP3 that exploit masking thresholds.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 772