The coherence of vowels as auditory objects was studied by comparing identification thresholds in noise for synthetic vowel sounds (differing only in the center frequency of a single formant) to identification thresholds for the distinctive formant presented in isolation. The bandwidth of the noise masker was limited so that it only interfered with perception of the distinctive formant. Thresholds for accurately identifying the vowel sounds were lower than those for identifying the isolated formant. This demonstrates that vowel sounds cohere in the sense that unmasked formants reduce the masking of a formant embedded in noise. The advantage of a complete vowel over an isolated formant appears to depend on the temporal alignment of the formants. When the onset of the distinctive formant coincides with the offset of the other formants, then listeners can still identify the vowel sound in modest amounts of noise. However, in this case thresholds are not lower for vowel identifications than for identifications of isolated formants. This indicates that temporal synchrony plays a basic role in the psychoacoustic coherence of vowels.

Motivation: DeGAUSS is a software application for geocoding and geomarker assessment that circumvents barriers related to cost and reproducibility presented by conventional approaches. Most importantly, DeGAUSS safeguards protected health information (PHI), such as a mailing address. Implementation: DeGAUSS is implemented as a family of software containers with R code, geospatial software libraries, and geographic data. The containers are available in online repositories and accessed by users through the command line. It is free and open-source software under continuous development. General Features: DeGAUSS operates locally, ensuring that PHI is not passed over the internet, and reproducibly, which allows for easier operation in multi-site studies. In addition to geocoding, software containers are available for many geomarkers commonly utilized in epidemiological studies, including data related to the census, meteorology, land cover, greenspace, roadways, access to care, and air pollution. Availability: This software is freely available via “GitHub Container Registry” at https://degauss.org/.

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