Noise in human hearing

Abstract

We modeled the hearing detection process as a thresholded Hopf bifucator and compared the performance to the results of actual listening experiments. Nonlinear suppression was observed in the response of the hair cell to multi-tone stimuli. This nonlinear suppression limits the degradation of hearing response especially for a low level signal even under increasing number of applied stimuli. Performance of the detector base on the model is in agreement with the performance of humans in voice tracking tasks. Our analysis provides a physical basis for the cocktail party effect (CPE).