Influence of attack transient and decay times of percussive sounds on the echo threshold

The human ability to localize a direct sound source in the presence of reflected sounds is well known as the precedence effect. The echo threshold defines the time delay of the reflection, above which the reflection becomes audible as a separate event. For musical instruments, various attack transient and decay times affect the echo threshold, but often a constant echo threshold of 50 ms is assumed for music. The aim of this study is to determine in more detail how the parameters of a test sound affect the echo threshold. For this purpose, 12 adult listeners with normal hearing participated in a psychoacoustic experiment to determine the echo threshold for various percussive and nonpercussive instrument sounds. In the headphone‐based experiment, the lead was placed with an interaural time difference (ITD) of ±300 μs, while the lag was presented from the opposite side. Interstimulus interval (ISI) values of 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 ms were tested. The results of the experiment showed a large variati...