Auditory Masking

Auditory masking is a phenomenon where the perception of one sound is affected by the presence of another sound. This occurs when two or more sounds overlap in such a way that one sound becomes less audible or completely inaudible due to the masking effect of the other. Masking is important for compressing audio since we can remove or reduce the quality of sounds that are unlikely to be heard by the human ear, thus reducing the file size without a noticeable loss in audio quality. Masking can be divided into two categories: temporal masking and frequency masking.