Extending the domain of center frequencies for the compressive gammachirp auditory filter.

The gammatone filter was imported from auditory physiology to provide a time-domain version of the roex auditory filter and enable the development of a realistic auditory filterbank for models of auditory perception [Patterson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 98, 1890-1894 (1995)]. The gammachirp auditory filter was developed to extend the domain of the gammatone auditory filter and simulate the changes in filter shape that occur with changes in stimulus level. Initially, the gammachirp filter was limited to center frequencies in the 2.0-kHz region where there were sufficient "notched-noise" masking data to define its parameters accurately. Recently, however, the range of the masking data has been extended in two massive studies. This paper reports how a compressive version of the gammachirp auditory filter was fitted to these new data sets to define the filter parameters over the extended frequency range. The results show that the shape of the filter can be specified for the entire domain of the data using just six constants (center frequencies from 0.25 to 6.0 kHz and levels from 30 to 80 dB SPL). The compressive, gammachirp auditory filter also has the advantage of being consistent with physiological studies of cochlear filtering insofar as the compression of the filter is mainly limited to the passband and the form of the chirp in the impulse response is largely independent of level.