In an effort to further describe the monaural and binaural processes involved in the detection of a gated tonal signal in a background of gated masking noise, a series of experiments has been initiated utilizing computer‐generated, reproducible waveforms. The signal used has been a gated 500‐Hz tone and the masker is a gated 400–600‐Hz bandpass noise. Our initial effort has been concerned with the influence of the magnitude of the phase angle alpha, the angle at which the tonal signal is added to the noise masker, on the detect‐ability of the signal in both homophasic and antiphasic masking conditions. Our results suggest that the magnitude of alpha is extremely important in accounting for performance in the homophasic masking conditions but that the magnitude of alpha does not strongly influence performance in the anti‐phasic masking conditions. These results are compared to predictions based on an electrical model described by Jeffress [J. Acoust. Soc. Am.41, 480–488 (1967)], which consists of a leaky integrator preceded by a narrow bandpass filter and half‐wave rectifier.