Phase & Hearing Impairment

[Jon Boley <jdboley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll start a new thread since this is somewhat tangential to the
earlier question related specifically to speech & MFCCs...

Anecdotally, I have seen that some people have difficulty detecting a
Duifhuis (1970) pitch when one tone is out of phase with several other
harmonically related tones.  One person that I recently spoke with
about his difficulty pointed out that he had some high frequency
hearing loss, but that his thresholds were normal in the region of the
out-of-phase tone.  This made me wonder -- could this be related to
the difficulty that Lorenzi et al (2009) pointed out... that is, that
high-frequency impairment seems to be related to impaired hearing in
the "normal" frequency range?
Does anyone know of any research that has evaluated the ability to
detect simple phase offsets in harmonic complexes in people with
increased high frequency thresholds?

I'm thinking that it might be interesting to see phase offset
thresholds as a function of frequency...  which I imagine might be
correlated to the width of psychophysical tuning curves.

- Jon


Duifhuis, H. (1970). ‘‘Audibility of high harmonics in a periodic
pulse,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 48, 888–893.

Lorenzi C, Debruille L, Garnier S, Fleuriot P, Moore BC (2009)
Abnormal processing of temporal fine structure in speech for
frequencies where absolute thresholds are normal. J Acoust Soc Am
125:27–30