THE MASKING OF NARROW-BAND NOISE BY BROAD-BAND HARMONIC COMPLEX SOUNDS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PROCESSING OF SPEECH SOUNDS

The evaluation of processed and synthesized speech is closely related to the auditory perception of complex sounds. An understanding of the perception of complex sounds is therefore helpful to improve the quali ty of processed sounds. The perceptual study of speech sounds in this paper is mainly concerned with auditory masking. Unlike most such stud ies, the targets in our experiment are narrowband noise signals and th e maskers are wideband harmonic complex sounds. We show that the detec tion of targets at low frequencies is mainly determined by the spectra l properties of the maskers. At high frequencies, the detection of tar gets is predominantly determined by the temporal behaviour of maskers. The relative contributions of spectral and temporal analysis strongly depend on the fundamental frequency of the masker. Better temporal re solution is associated with a higher masker level.