Auditory filter bank design using masking curves

It is very difficult and costly to experimentally observe the motion of the basilar membrane in a fully functional cochlea with the view to obtaining amplitude response at points along the membrane. This paper presents an inexpensive method of generating psychoacoustic tuning curves from the well-known masking curves in critical band rate. We present a method for designing critical band auditory filters from the tuning curves. It is also known that the auditory filter frequency response becomes broader with increasing input signal levels and becomes narrower with decreasing signal levels. We also propose a method for designing level dependent auditory filters. The proposed filter bank is applicable to various types of signal processing required to model human auditory filtering.