When dealing with copyright protection for audio, watermarking can be considered to label the digital medium, by hiding information into the data. To make the watermark imperceptible and robust against some signal processing, we propose in this paper a new method based on frequential substitution, for which the bit error rate is lower than those obtained with existing methods. For such a purpos...

Phase locking between probe and masker was used in a series of pure-tone masking experiments. The masker was a stationary sine wave of variable frequency; the probe a fixed-frequency tone burst. We have observed that for small frequency separation the masking behaves asymmetrically around the probe frequency. This asymmetry depends on intensity. For a 1-kHz probe at low stimulus levels there is...

Many applications in auditory modeling require analysis filters that approximate the frequency selectivity given by psychophysical data, e.g. from masking experiments using narrow-band maskers. This frequency selectivity is largely determined by the spectral decomposition process inside the human cochlea. Currently used spectral decomposition schemes for masking modeling in audio coding general...

Formant transitions are critical for identifying the place of articulation for consonants. If these transitions are masked by background noise, perceptual confusions can occur. To better understand the masking of formant transitions, masking thresholds were measured for tone glides and single-formant trajectories of varying frequency extent (0-3 ERBs), duration (10, 30 and 100 ms), and center f...

The masking effects of tones on the detection auditory signals were studied in goldfish using the psychophysical tuning-curve paradigm. For signals below 350 Hz, masking is an inverse function of the frequency separation between masker and signal; a finding consistent with previous masking studies on fishes, birds and mammals. For signals above 350 Hz, masking peaks occur both in the 350 Hz reg...

We measured the strength and optimal target-mask onset asynchrony (SOA(max)) of metacontrast masking using Gabor patches as targets and sinusoidal rings with Gaussian envelopes as masks. We varied spatial frequencies (f) between 0.5 and 8 cpd to manipulate the degree to which spatial frequency channels in the visual system are triggered. By varying spatial frequencies as well as spatial frequen...

The temporal masking curve (TMC) method is a behavioral technique for inferring human cochlear compression. The method relies on the assumptions that in the absence of compression, forward-masking recovery is independent of masker level and probe frequency. The present study aimed at testing the validity of these assumptions. Masking recovery was investigated for eight listeners with sensorineu...