White masking noise affects consonant perception in time slices as short as 100 ms.
Evidence
Most remarkably, even a 100-ms time shift in the white masking-noise waveform induced significant perceptual variability, indicating that “steady-state” masking noise should not be considered steady over time in the context of consonant cues. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5575
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing work on the soundscape and lo-fi acoustics: ‘steady-state’ masking noise behaving non-stationarily parallels how keynote sounds are only noticed when they change.
Related
- Steady-state masking noise varies perceptually even with a 100-ms time shift. (similarity 0.94)
- Speech tokens were embedded in onset-anchored masking noise to control for temporal position. (similarity 0.90)
- Talker identity causes more perceptual variation in consonant perception than noise waveform shifts (similarity 0.85)
- Time-shifting an identical noise masker changes consonant perception measurably. (similarity 0.85)
- Temporal masking alone masks brief consonants even without room reverberation. (similarity 0.84)
- Noise and reverberation both mask consonants, which are about 20 dB quieter than vowels (similarity 0.82)
- Plosive consonants get masked by preceding loud vowels even in free field (similarity 0.81)
- Postmasking stays at simultaneous-masking level for 5ms then decays to quiet by 200ms. (similarity 0.81)
- Speech masking in noise stems from inherent temporal-envelope modulations rather than overall noise energy. (similarity 0.80)
- White noise masking of tones is linear but frequency-dependent above 500 Hz (similarity 0.80)
- Temporal partial masking of loudness is robust across sound types and frequencies (similarity 0.80)
- Added masking noise prevents off-frequency cues in hearing experiments (similarity 0.80)
- Uniform masking noise can substitute for threshold-in-quiet across all frequencies. (similarity 0.80)
- Three acoustic properties determine whether a sound masks another. (similarity 0.80)
- Strong condensation can suppress masking below the quiet threshold (similarity 0.80)