Principles of modulation processing in monaural vs. binaural hearing

Several phenomena have been investigated that facilitate the perception of masked sound as there are binaural masking level differences (BMLD) and comodulation masking release (CMR). It is assumed that both across-channel CMR and high-frequency BMLD use envelope correlation between different channels as a detection cue.

Durlach [1] introduced the equalization-cancellation (EC) approach as an across-channel mechanism for explaining BMLD and it was recently used to quantitatively account for many binaural listening experiments. Buus [2] was the first to suggest that an EC-type mechanism could also be appropriate to account for CMR.

However, it was never tested if such an approach is able to quantitatively predict CMR. The aim of the present study is to introduce an EC type model in monaural modulation processing and to test it with a certain stimulus configuration.