ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

2pPP19. Synthesis of common-envelope signal pairs.

Depts. of Elec. Eng. & Speech and Hear. Sci., 2015 Neil Ave., Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH 43210

A large class of sounds can be described in terms of rapid pressure fluctuations known as the ``fine structure'' and relatively slower amplitude changes called the ``envelope.'' Signals having the same envelope and occupying the same range of frequencies, but differing in their fine structure, are important to the study of fine structure perception. Voelcker's [Proc. IEEE 54, 340--353, 735--755 (1966)] complementary two-tone complex pair is one of the simplest signals in this class, and has been used in a number of pitch related experiments. As an extension of these ideas, a computational algorithm is described to generate a common-envelope pair occupying the same range of frequencies of any bandlimited signal. Several properties of common-envelope signals are presented and methods of combining these signals to create other common-envelope signals are given. A few examples of multicomponent common-envelope signals are spectrally reversed linear-spaced complexes, spectral ramps, and multiple Voelcker two-tone pairs. Applications of these signals to psychoacoustic experiments are discussed. [Work supported by AFOSR.]