Evaluation of a physiological ear model for the simulation of nonlinear masking effects

A physiological model of the human auditory system with the aim at generating masked thresholds for arbitrary complex sound signals is evaluated with respect to nonlinear mechanisms in masking. In [1, 2] it was shown that the ear model is able to rebuild the level-dependency of spectral and temporal masking patterns, the asymmetry of masking between noise and tone, and the different detection thresholds for amplitude and frequency modulation. The simulation results in this paper indicate that nonlinear mechanisms such as the additivity of masking, suppression, and distortion product detection are reproduced as well by the physiological ear model. Since the model represents a unified approach comprising the most important masking effects of complex sounds, it is suitable for applications in audio signal processing.