Dear colleagues
We are doing a study with a simple stimulus. It's a periodic complex tone which is interrupted briefly by a noise burst (noise starts and ends at a zero crossing, and there's a short ramp on either side). On half the trials the tone continues with the same
phase as if no noise had occurred. In the other trials, the phase is flipped by 180 degrees. (See figure below)
Question: does anybody know of a previous experiment with a similar setup? Is the phase flip perceivable? Casual listening by a few of us in the lab suggests it is not, and we will do proper psychophysics to test this out. But we thought that perhaps to avoid
re-inventing the wheel we should see if something like this has already been tried. There are dozens of papers out there on various aspects of phase perception, but most seem to deal with binaural hearing or manipulations of phase of the harmonics of a complex
tone, neither of which are really relevant.
Thank you in advance for your collective wisdom.
Robert
without phase shift
With phase shift:
Robert Zatorre, PhD
Professor and Canada Research Chair
Montreal Neurological Institute
McGill University
514-398-8903
fax: 514-398-1338
www.zlab.mcgill.ca