Auditory two-tone suppression from a subcritical Hopf cochlea

Cochlear two-tone suppression is the dominant contrast-sharpening phenomenon of hearing and provides a decisive test for the correct implementation of hearing nonlinearities in models of the cochlea. Although critically tuned Hopf amplifiers were shown recently to be fruitful models of intricate phenomena in the physiology of the human ear, we find that only a model based on subcritical Hopf amplifiers is capable of reproducing physiologically measured two-tone suppression data adequately. In addition, we provide a detailed explanation of the two-tone suppression phenomenon, including its quantitative characterization.