Auditory filter bandwidths in binaural and monaural listening conditions.

The shape and the effective bandwidth of the auditory filter at 500 Hz was examined for binaural and monaural tone-in-noise detection experiments in four normal listeners. In the binaural condition, a broadband noise with an interaural phase difference of 0 below and an interaural phase difference of pi above a certain "edge frequency" was employed to mask a 500-Hz probe tone with an interaural phase pi (denoted as No pi S pi). The threshold of the probe tone as a function of the edge frequency in this configuration and in a configuration with an inverted interaural phase of the masker (denoted as N pi oS pi) was fitted by assuming different filter shapes and optimizing their respective parameters. In an analogous monaural experiment, the spectral power density of the masker was 15 dB lower below the "edge frequency" or 15 dB lower above this frequency, respectively. Several filter characteristics with two free parameters describe the data almost equally well. Their equivalent rectangular bandwidths (ERB) show considerably more variations between filter shapes than the 10-dB bandwidth and the 90% bandwidth values (i.e., the bandwidths encompassing 90% of the integrated area above and below the center frequency). This indicates that either of these two bandwidth parameters is more appropriate for comparing auditory filter bandwidths than the ERB. For the rounded exponential filter, the 90% bandwidth averages to 147 Hz in the binaural and to 125 Hz in the monaural condition. These values are up to 12% higher if off-frequency detection is accounted for. Our general finding of auditory filter bandwidths in the binaural conditions exceeding the monaural bandwidths by approximately 20% may be caused by two factors: First, off-frequency detection may be performed in monaural, but not in binaural detections tasks and second, the random interaural mismatch in binaural noise reduction processes fluctuates slowly and thus modulates and spectrally smears the output signal of the binaural noise reduction process.