Parra Lucas C, Pearlmutter Barak A
Biomedical Engineering Department, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2007 Mar;121(3):1632-41. doi: 10.1121/1.2431346.
Phenomena resembling tinnitus and Zwicker phantom tone are seen to result from an auditory gain adaptation mechanism that attempts to make full use of a fixed-capacity channel. In the case of tinnitus, the gain adaptation enhances internal noise of a frequency band otherwise silent due to damage. This generates a percept of a phantom sound as a consequence of hearing loss. In the case of Zwicker tone, a frequency band is temporarily silent during the presentation of a notched broadband sound, resulting in a percept of a tone at the notched frequency. The model suggests a link between tinnitus and the Zwicker tone percept, in that it predicts different results for normal and tinnitus subjects due to a loss of instantaneous nonlinear compression. Listening experiments on 44 subjects show that tinnitus subjects (11 of 44) are significantly more likely to hear the Zwicker tone. This psychoacoustic experiment establishes the first empirical link between the Zwicker tone percept and tinnitus. Together with the modeling results, this supports the hypothesis that the phantom percept is a consequence of a central adaptation mechanism confronted with a degraded sensory apparatus.
类似于耳鸣和齐克纳幻音的现象被认为是由一种听觉增益适应机制导致的，该机制试图充分利用固定容量的通道。在耳鸣的情况下，增益适应增强了原本因损伤而无声的频段的内部噪声。这会由于听力损失而产生幻听的感觉。在齐克纳音的情况下，在呈现带凹口的宽带声音期间，一个频段会暂时无声，从而导致在凹口频率处产生音调的感觉。该模型表明耳鸣与齐克纳音感觉之间存在联系，因为它预测由于瞬时非线性压缩的丧失，正常人和耳鸣患者会有不同的结果。对44名受试者进行的听力实验表明，耳鸣患者（44名中的11名）明显更有可能听到齐克纳音。这项心理声学实验建立了齐克纳音感觉与耳鸣之间的第一个实证联系。与建模结果一起，这支持了幻听是中央适应机制面对退化的感觉器官的结果这一假设。
