Yup! This is called temporal masking [1]. There's also simultaneous or frequency masking. If you've ever wondered why loud noises prevent you from hearing some

Yup! This is called temporal masking [1]. There's also simultaneous or frequency masking. If you've ever wondered why loud noises prevent you from hearing something that would otherwise be perfectly audible (e.g. a loud motorcycle driving by your apartment can temporarily drown out a noisy air conditioner), that's why. Both of these psychoacoustic concepts are used in perceptual audio encoders like MP3 - the idea being that certain bits can be discarded because the listener wouldn't be able to hear them anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking