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I'm trying to make an implementation of the Huggins Binaural Pitch illusion, which is where if you play whitenoise into each ear, but offset one ear by a period $T$ that it will create the illusion of a tone of $1/T$.

Unfortunately when I try this, I don't hear any tone.

I've found a python implementation here, but unfortunately I don't know python (I'm a C++ guy) and while I see that this person is doing some extra filtering work and other things, it's hard to pick apart which extra work may be required versus just dressing.

Here is a 3 second wav file that I've made:

stereonoise.wav

The first 1.5 seconds is white noise. The second half of the sound has the right ear shifted forward 220 samples. The sound file has a sample rate of 44100, so that 220 sample offset corresponds to a period of 0.005 seconds aka 5 milliseconds aka 200hz.

I don't hear a 200hz tone though.

Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong?

The 160 line single file standalone (no libs/non standard headers etc) c++ code is here: http://pastebin.com/ZCd0wjW1

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1 Answer 1

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I just glanced at a paper on this subject, and it appears that you should be introducing an inter-aural 0-to-2PI phase shift over a very narrow frequency range, rather than offsetting one signal by T. I can imagine a variety of ways to create the phase-modified noise signal, included filtering a noise signal with a high-Q 2nd-order allpass filter, or by directly creating two noise signals by summing randomly-phased sinusoids, and directly imposing the desired phase(Left)-phase(right) condition by setting the phases of the 2 arrays appropriately.

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