Audio Masking Effect – Part 4
For a creative musical performance, it is very important (from the point of view of the performer and the sound engineer) to use these techniques in practice.
It is not difficult to assume that the phenomenon of “novelty” neuron activation is ultimately subject to adaptive processes, reducing the perceptual brightness of even the sound recorded according to all the rules, subject to repeated listening. For example, if you play the same piece of music for several days in a row, your perception is noticeably weakened and weakened. But the essence of this phenomenon is not fully understood. Along with the sensitivity of the auditory system to the amplitude-frequency dependence of the timbre of the sound, there is also a phase dependence, that is, the human hearing aid is susceptible to phase changes between various components of the signal within 10- 15 degrees. This phase-dependent effect is easier to hear in practice in the lower frequency range (below 100 Hz), since it is in this area that time processes prevail. The timbre, in addition to all of the above, makes it possible to highlight the source of the sound and determine the physical nature.
In recognizing and isolating the individual sounds of everything that enters the ear canals, there are certain principles closely related to the study of the timbre of sound:
division into sound streams, in other words: subjective separation of a fixed group of sound sources;
sounds similar in timbre and pitch are grouped together and identified as belonging to the same source;
the auditory system can “skip” and ignore the presence of a short beep in a continuous stream of noise or music;
sounds, whose development and change of phase and frequency occur more or less synchronously, are attributed to a source;
It is much more interesting to consider the brain’s ability not only to group and process received sound information, but also its ability to compare received sound combinations with available images. This means that if during the comparison the sound differs from the “reference” sound being compared, certain “virtual” properties and characteristics are attributed to that signal.
