Re: By any other name...

[Daniel Pressnitzer <Daniel.Pressnitzer@xxxxxx>]

Dear Bruno,

I think that the interrupting sound has to provide energy in the same 
receptors as the interrupted one, for the illusion to occur, but that 
many other aspects of the response they produce can be vastly different. 
In this respect, the signal is really absent during the illusion.

For instance, a noise burst will provide energy in the frequency 
channels tuned to a pure tone, but the time-intervals within those 
channels will differ (for those of us who believe in these sort of 
things...). What the noise is doing, I think, is not replacing the 
signal but rather making the overall neural pattern consistent with a 
'signal masked by noise' hypothesis.

Another example are illusions produced by time-varying stimuli, like 
frequency- or amplitude-modulated ones. Would one say that the noise 
contains the modulation somehow?

Cheers,

Daniel