The temporal dynamics of pitch perception and what they reveal about processing mechanisms
Abstract
Hearing impairment can severely restrict the ability to communicate through speech in noisy environments. One of the most important cues for segregating wanted from unwanted sounds is temporal regularity, or harmonicity in the frequency domain, giving rise to the perception of pitch. However, pitch is a strong segregation cue only in the low-frequency region, where harmonic components are spectrally at least partially resolved. In contrast, spectrally unresolved pitch, produced by high-frequency sounds, is a much weaker segregation cue. This and other differences led to the assumption that resolved and unresolved pitch are processed by different mechanisms – a spectral one for resolved pitch and a temporal one for unresolved pitch. The aim of this study was to test this assumption by measuring the temporal dynamics of pitch perception in the resolved and unresolved regions. For that, the threshold for the detection of a gap in the autocorrelation function of iterated rippled noise was measured as a function of the pitch value and the spectral region of the stimulus. The minimum detectable gap duration would be expected to be largely independent of pitch value, if pitch were processed spectrally. Contrary to this expectation, we found that the minimum detect-able gap duration decreases with increasing pitch value in an approximately reciprocal way, suggesting that pitch is processed temporally even in the low-frequency region. The experimental data are compared to predictions from models of auditory temporal processing.
References
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