We used the binaural beat stimulus to study the interaural phase sensitivity of inferior colliculus (IC) neurons in the cat. The binaural beat, produced by delivering tones of slightly different frequencies to the two ears, generates continuous and graded changes in interaural phase. Over 90% of the cells that exhibit a sensitivity to changes in the interaural delay also show a sensitivity to i...

The current study investigates how the spatial locations of a target and masker influence consonant identification in anechoic and reverberant space. Reverberation was expected to interfere with the task both directly by degrading consonant identification and indirectly by altering interaural cues and decreasing spatial unmasking. Performance was measured as a function of target-to-masker ratio...

Although many researchers have commented on the potential of audio display technology to improve intelligibility in multitalker speech communication tasks, no consensus exists on how to design an “optimal” multitalker speech display. In this article, we review several experiments that have used a consistent procedure to evaluate the effect of four monaural parameters on overall intelligibility....

We consider the task of speech source localization using binaural cues, namely interaural time and level difference (ITD & ILD). A typical approach is to process binaural speech using gammatone filters and calculate frame-level ITD and ILD in each subband. The ITD, ILD and their combination (ITLD) in each subband are statistically modelled using Gaussian mixture models for every direction durin...

Several masking experiments have shown that the auditory system is able to use coherent envelope fluctuations of the masker across frequency within one ear as well as differences in interaural disparity between signal and masker to enhance signal detection. The two effects associated with these abilities are comodulation masking release (CMR) and binaural masking level difference (BMLD). The ai...

Future generations of mobile communication devices will serve more and more as multimedia platforms capable of reproducing high quality audio. In order to achieve a 3-D sound perception the reproduction quality of audio via headphones can be significantly increased by applying binaural technology. To be independent of individual head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and to guarantee a good pe...

A multimicrophone speech enhancement algorithm for binaural hearing aids that preserves interaural time delays was proposed recently. The algorithm is based on multichannel Wiener filtering and relies on a voice activity detector (VAD) for estimation of second-order statistics. Here, the effect of a VAD on the speech enhancement of this algorithm was evaluated using an envelopebased VAD, and th...