Perceptual Evaluation of the Effect of Threshold in Selective Mixing of Sounds

Signal processing methods make possible such a mixing of signals that their overlapping in the time-frequency plane is reduced. This can be achieved by reducing the number of overlapping signals by discarding contributions from weaker signals and leaving only contributions from stronger ones. When applied to acoustic signals, this is referred to by the authors as selective mixing of sounds. Previous research has shown, that this rule, when applied to signals of musical instruments can provide some perceptual advantages over simple adding up the sound sources. In this paper, an experiment was carried out to determine the threshold of the value of relative energy of sound sources to control the decision about discarding a contribution from a particular sound source.