Pitch strength of noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes in normal-hearing listeners.

To study the role of harmonic structure in pitch perception, normal-hearing listeners were tested using noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes. When tested in a magnitude judgment procedure using vocoded versions generated with 2-128 channels, judgments of pitch strength increased systematically as the number of channels increased and reflected acoustic cues based on harmonic peak-to-valley ratio, but not cues based on periodicity strength. When tested in a fundamental frequency discrimination task, listeners correctly recognized the direction of pitch change with as few as eight noise-vocoded channels. The results suggest that spectral processing contributes substantially to pitch perception in normal-hearing listeners.

[1]  Diana Deutsch,et al.  Octave generalization and tune recognition , 1972 .

[2]  R S Turner.  The Ohm-Seebeck dispute, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the origins of physiological acoustics. , 1977, British journal for the history of science.

[3]  E. M. Burns,et al.  Played-again SAM: Further observations on the pitch of amplitude-modulated noise , 1981 .

[4]  Murray B. Sachs,et al.  Representation of voice pitch in discharge patterns of auditory-nerve fibers , 1984, Hearing Research.

[5]  W. Yost.  Pitch strength of iterated rippled noise. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  W. Yost.  Pitch of iterated rippled noise. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  W. Shofner,et al.  Pitch strength and Stevens’s power law , 2002, Perception & psychophysics.

[8]  Qian-Jie Fu,et al.  The number of spectral channels required for speech recognition depends on the difficulty of the listening situation. , 2004, Acta oto-laryngologica. Supplementum.

[9]  Andrew J Oxenham,et al.  Correct tonotopic representation is necessary for complex pitch perception. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[10]  Brian C J Moore,et al.  Frequency discrimination of complex tones; assessing the role of component resolvability and temporal fine structure. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  Michael V Keebler,et al.  Can temporal fine structure represent the fundamental frequency of unresolved harmonics? , 2009, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  Andrew J. Oxenham,et al.  Otoacoustic Estimation of Cochlear Tuning: Validation in the Chinchilla , 2010, Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

[13]  Andrew J Oxenham,et al.  Pitch perception beyond the traditional existence region of pitch , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[14]  A. Oxenham,et al.  Further evidence that fundamental-frequency difference limens measure pitch discrimination. , 2012, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  W. Shofner,et al.  Processing pitch in a nonhuman mammal (Chinchilla laniger). , 2013, Journal of comparative psychology.