The Masking of Tones by White Noise as a Function of the Interaural Phases of Both Components. I. 500 Cycles
Lloyd A. Jeffress, Hugh C. Blodgett, Bruce H. Deatherage · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1952
Work by Hawkins, Hirsh, Licklider, Stevens, Webster, and others has shown the considerable reduction in masking which occurs when the interaural phase of either the signal or the noise is reversed, or when the interaural phase of the signal is shifted by various amounts. The present paper extends this work by shifting the interaural phases of the masking component of the noise and of the tone by various amounts between +180° and −180°, and also by shifting the noise timewise by amounts up to 4.0 milliseconds. The interaural phases of both the noise and the 500∼ tonal signal are therefore parameters of this study. The results are in agreement with those already published, but show in addition large reductions in threshold even when the noise and the tone differ in their interaural phase positions by amounts less than 180°. They also show a periodic fall and rise of the masked threshold as the interaural time difference for the noise is varied. Finally, they show the importance of interaural correlation in determining the extent to which the binaural threshold will be lower than the monaural.