A new approach is introduced for time-scale modification of short-duration complex acoustic signals to improve their audibility. The method preserves the time-scaled temporal envelope of a signal and for enhancement capitalizes on the perceptual importance of a signal's temporal structure. The basis for the approach is a sub-band representation whose channel phases are controlled to shape the temporal envelope of the time-scaled signal. The phase control is derived from locations of events which occur within filterbank outputs. A frame-based generalization of the method imposes phase consistency across consecutive synthesis frames. The approach is applied to synthetic and actual short-duration acoustic signals consisting of closely-spaced and overlapping sequential time components.