Rhythmic Masking Release: Effects of Asynchrony, Temporal Overlap, Harmonic Relations, and Source Separation on Cross-Spectral Grouping (original) (raw)
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The rhythm created by spacing a series of brief tones in a regular pattern can be disguised by interleaving identical distractors at irregular intervals. The disguised rhythm can be unmasked if the distractors are allocated to a separate stream from the rhythm by integration with temporally overlapping captors. Listeners identified which of 2 rhythms was presented, and the accuracy and rated clarity of their judgment was used to estimate the fusion of the distractors and captors. The extent of fusion depended primarily on onset asynchrony and degree of temporal overlap. Harmonic relations had some influence, but only an extreme difference in spatial location was effective (dichotic presentation). Both preattentive and attentionally driven processes governed performance.
Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2002
The contribution of temporal asynchrony, spatial separation, and frequency separation to the cross-spectral fusion of temporally contiguous brief narrow-band noise bursts was studied using the Rhythmic Masking Release paradigm ͑RMR͒. RMR involves the discrimination of one of two possible rhythms, despite perceptual masking of the rhythm by an irregular sequence of sounds identical to the rhythmic bursts, interleaved among them. The release of the rhythm from masking can be induced by causing the fusion of the irregular interfering sounds with concurrent ''flanking'' sounds situated in different frequency regions. The accuracy and the rated clarity of the identified rhythm in a 2-AFC procedure were employed to estimate the degree of fusion of the interferring sounds with flanking sounds. The results suggest that while synchrony fully fuses short-duration noise bursts across frequency and across space ͑i.e., across ears and loudspeakers͒, an asynchrony of 20-40 ms produces no fusion. Intermediate asynchronies of 10-20 ms produce partial fusion, where the presence of other cues is critical for unambiguous grouping. Though frequency and spatial separation reduced fusion, neither of these manipulations was sufficient to abolish it. For the parameters varied in this study, stimulus onset asynchrony was the dominant cue determining fusion, but there were additive effects of the other cues. Temporal synchrony appears to be critical in determining whether brief sounds with abrupt onsets and offsets are heard as one event or more than one.
The Perception of Rhythm and Word Boundaries in Noise-Masked Speech
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1989
The present experiment tested the suggestion that human listeners may exploit durational information in speech to parse continuous utterances into words. Listeners were presented with six-syllable unpredictable utterances under noise-masking, and were required to judge between alternative word strings as to which best matched the rhythm of the masked utterances. For each utterance there were four alternative strings: (a) an exact rhythmic and word boundary match, (b) a rhythmic mismatch, and (c) two utterances with the same rhythm as the masked utterance, but different word boundary locations. Listeners were clearly able to perceive the rhythm of the masked utterances: The rhythmic mismatch was chosen significantly less often than any other alternative. Within the three rhythmically matched alternatives, the exact match was chosen significantly more often than either word boundary mismatch. Thus, listeners both perceived speech rhythm and used durational cues effectively to locate t...
Auditory Masking and the Precedence Effect in Studies of Musical Timekeeping
Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2018 on Sound in Immersion and Emotion
Musical timekeeping is an important and evolving area of research with applications in a variety of music education and performance situations. Studies in this Iield are often concerned with being able to measure the accuracy or consistency of human participants, for whatever purpose is being investigated. Our initial explorations suggest that little has been done to consider the role that auditory masking, speciIically the precedence effect, plays in the study of human timekeeping tasks. In this paper, we highlight the importance of integrating masking into studies of timekeeping and suggest areas for discussion and future research, to address shortfalls in the literature.
Method-of-adjustment measures of informational masking between auditory streams
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
A method-of-adjustment procedure was used to measure thresholds for detecting a continuous sequence of brief 2-kHz tonal pulses in the presence of random-frequency masking sequences. Masker pulses consisted of either one or eight sinusoidal components and were either synchronous or asynchronous with the signal pulses. Effects of pulse rate and asynchronous gating were generally consistent with a reduction in informational masking due to segregation of the signal and masker streams. Despite use of continuous stimulus presentation to encourage stream segregation, masking was still obtained from most listeners in most conditions.
Effects of Rhythmicity on Speech Perception in Speech and Musical Contexts
2019
Speech and music share the property of being organized into hierarchical units which influence aspects of their timing and perception. A key difference is found in the specific timing patterns found in language and music, however, in that the latter generally shows a much stricter adherence to rhythmic regularity. The higher level of precision in processing of temporal and melodic events in music has been hypothesized to be a key factor in explaining how musical experience can lead to enhanced speech processing [24]. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that perception of speech in the context of musical beats is more adversely affected by contextual rhythmic irregularities than is speech in the context of other nonsense speech sounds or within a cohesive phrase. In some phrasal contexts, temporal irregularities are in fact found to be beneficial for perception.
The effects of rhythm and melody on auditory stream segregation
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014
While many studies have assessed the efficacy of similarity-based cues for auditory stream segregation, much less is known about whether and how the larger-scale structure of sound sequences support stream formation and the choice of sound organization. Two experiments investigated the effects of musical melody and rhythm on the segregation of two interleaved tone sequences. The two sets of tones fully overlapped in pitch range but differed from each other in interaural time and intensity. Unbeknownst to the listener, separately, each of the interleaved sequences was created from the notes of a different song. In different experimental conditions, the notes and/or their timing could either follow those of the songs or they could be scrambled or, in case of timing, set to be isochronous. Listeners were asked to continuously report whether they heard a single coherent sequence (integrated) or two concurrent streams (segregated). Although temporal overlap between tones from the two streams proved to be the strongest cue for stream segregation, significant effects of tonality and familiarity with the songs were also observed. These results suggest that the regular temporal patterns are utilized as cues in auditory stream segregation and that long-term memory is involved in this process.
Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory
Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 2015
Across 5 experiments, the temporal regularity and content of an irrelevant speech stream were varied and their effects on a serial recall task examined. Variations of the content, but not the rhythm, of the irrelevant speech stimuli reliably disrupted serial recall performance in all experiments. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis over the hypothesis that irregular rhythms would disrupt memory to a greater extent than regular rhythms. Pooling the data in a combined analysis revealed that regular presentation of the irrelevant speech was significantly more disruptive to serial recall than irregular presentation. These results are consistent with the idea that auditory distraction is sensitive to both intraitem and interitem relations and challenge an orienting-based account of auditory distraction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Recognition masking of auditory duration
Perception & Psychophysics, 1986
Forward and backward recognition masking of tonal duration were assessed using young adults as listeners. The task was to label as "short" or "long" a target tone that had a masking tone following or preceding it by a variable silent interstimulus interval as!). Forward-and backwardmasking effects were virtually equivalent. On both forward-and backward-masking trials, (1) percentages correct increased with increases in ISIs, (2) the probability of responding "long" to the target increased with increases in ISIs, and (3) the probability of responding "long" increased with increases in the duration of the mask. The equivalence of backward and forward duration masking argues against an interruption theory of duration masking. It is suggested that some form of integration theory, preferably one that includes components unique to the perception of duration, may better account for the results.