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Hi Massimo,
Repetition can help immensely; I'd suggest that you take a peek at some nice work by Josh McDermott et al on the effects of repetition in noisy signals: McDermott, J.H., Wrobleski, D., Oxenham, A.J. (2011) Recovering sound sources from embedded repetition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 1188-1193. Also (and at the risk of self-promotion) I will say that we published a study last year on a somewhat related phenomenon that you are alluding to here, that of hearing things that are not in a signal. We presented listeners with broadband noise that was -- in the long term white -- but changed randomly in its spectrum from moment to moment. We then asked them to press a button when they heard one of two vowel sounds. In some trials they were listening for [a] and in others [i:]. Then using response triggered averaging (reverse correlation), we averaged the spectrum of the signals leading up to each button press and voilà: what emerged was the spectrum of the vowel they were listening for. So despite the fact that we did not embed any actual vowel sounds in the random noise, listeners were responding to subtle variations in the noise that were somehow similar enough to their internal representations of those sounds. Turns out to be a nice (and relatively unbiased) way to estimate what someone imagines a particular sound to be. See the JASA article here: http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/133/2/10.1121/1.4778264 all the best, -Owen. ------------------------------------- W. Owen Brimijoin, PhD Investigator Scientist MRC/CSO Institute of Hearing Research Glasgow, United Kingdom +44 (0) 141 201 8766 owen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -------------------------------------On 17/06/2014 15:46, Massimo Grassi wrote: Dear list members, |