Introduction

The components of the HUTear toolbox were originally designed for the experiments reported in an internal report, Temporal masking effects: single incidents at Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Helsinki University of Technology However, since there were some interest among the researchers of the laboratory for a these tools we decided to collect them into a toolbox and make it available for anyone at http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/software/HUTear.

There exists already at least two more carefully designed and more versatile auditory modeling packages, e.g, Auditory Image Model and Development System for Auditory Modelling (also known as lutear). However, it is quite difficult to use those packages with MATLAB, even if a MATLAB front-end is available at least for the former. We have also encountered some problems in compiling those packages on different platforms. Malcolm Slaney's new Auditory Toolbox version 2 is also available and it contains several blocks which are not in the current version of HUTear. HUTear package uses some functions from a MATLAB toolkit by Toshio Irino. Some of his functions have been included into the HUTear package. If you want to use (optional) time-varying gammachirp filterbank with the model you must download his package or use our implementation. B. J. C. Moore from the University of Cambridge, Auditory Perception Group have also kindly provided code fragments which are used in a loudness model function [1].