Contextual modulation of cochlear hearing desensitization depends on the type of loud sound trauma

In ears in which cochlear efferent pathways were cut and with testing done under anaesthetic conditions that preclude middle ear muscle activity (so as to examine the “intrinsic” effects of loud sound on the cochlea without any confounding effect of efferent pathways to the auditory periphery), atraumatic background white noise (WN) increases cochlear hearing loss (temporary threshold shifts, TTSs) induced by a traumatic pure tone but reduces TTSs caused by traumatic 5-kHz wide narrow band (NB) sound. The short-duration moderately intense traumata used in these studies most likely cause TTSs by affecting cochlear mechanics and these WN modulatory effects, exerted directly on the cochlea’s intrinsic susceptibility to TTSs, are not predicted by any current description of cochlear mechanics. Here it is demonstrated that background WN reduces trauma-induced TTSs with even a relatively small increase in trauma bandwidth beyond that of a pure tone, discounting the alternative that contextual modulatory effects transition systematically along a continuum as trauma bandwidth increases from a pure tone to a broader bandwidth (albeit 2 kHz-wide NB) trauma. These results have implications for cochlear mechanics as the TTSs due to the traumatic sound of this study are most likely due to changes in cochlear mechanics but are not easily explained by what is currently known of cochlear mechanics.