Listeners’ ability to understand a target speaker in the presence of one or more simultaneous competing speakers is subject to two types of masking: Energetic and informational. Energetic masking occurs when target and interfering signals overlap in time and frequency resulting in portions of target becoming inaudible. Informational masking occurs when the listener is unable to segregate the ta...

Source separation is a difficult problem for which many algorithms have been proposed. In this article, we define oracle estimators which compute the best performance achievable by different classes of algorithms on a given mixture, in a theoretical evaluation framework where the reference sources are available. We describe explicit oracle estimators for four particular classes of algorithms: b...

A listener's ability to understand a target speaker in the presence of one or more simultaneous competing speakers is subject to two types of masking: energetic and informational. Energetic masking takes place when target and interfering signals overlap in time and frequency resulting in portions of target becoming inaudible. Informational masking occurs when the listener is unable to distingui...

A novel computationally highly e cient realization of sharp symmetrical bandstop FIR lter is proposed. The new structure is derived using the frequency-response-masking technique, where the bandedge-shaping lter is derived from half-band lter by substituting each delay of the half-band lter by M delays. The masking lters are unconventional. They are quadrature lters derived from linear combinat...

Listeners’ ability to understand a target speaker in the presence of one or more simultaneous competing speakers is subject to two types of masking: Energetic and informational. Energetic masking occurs when target and interfering signals overlap in time and frequency resulting in portions of target becoming inaudible. Informational masking occurs when the listener is unable to segregate the ta...

The ability to process facial expressions can be modified by altering the spatial frequency of the stimuli, an effect that has been attributed to differential properties of visual pathways that convey different types of information to distinct brain regions at different speeds. While this effect suggests a potential influence of spatial frequency on the processing speed of facial emotion, this ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the benefits of hearing aids on tinnitus according to the tinnitus reaction questionnaire (TRQ; Wilson et al, 1991), to verify whether the degree of masking provided by the hearing aid influenced the TRQ score, to examine whether the matched tinnitus pitch predicted the effectiveness of hearing aids in masking tinnitus, and to determine whether prescription of high-frequency...

Psychoacoustic adaptive threshold estimation procedures were implemented as “computer games” to measure, with no experimenter intervention, backward detection masking and frequency discrimination in 54 children aged 5–12 years. Assessments of the subjects’ pure-tone hearing thresholds, language abilities, and reading skills were also made. Thresholds were successfully obtained for backward mask...

In peripheral vision, high-frequency gratings beyond the Nyquist limit are visible as aliased patterns but, as shown previously, their visibility can be masked by superimposed sub-Nyquist gratings. Is the converse also true? Can supra-Nyquist gratings affect the detectability of sub-Nyquist gratings? In this study, we investigated the masking effect of high contrast, supra-Nyquist components of...