Abstract:
The perception of pitch forms the basis of musical melody and harmony. It is also the most precise of all our human senses. With imagination, this precision can be used experimentally to investigate the functioning of the auditory system. The Indianapolis tutorial will present auditory demonstrations from the zoo of pitch effects: pitch shifts, noise pitch, virtual pitch, dichotic pitch, and the pitches of things that are not there at all. The tutorial will introduce models of auditory processing, derived from contemporary psychoacoustics and auditory physiology, and will test these models against the experimental effects. It will conclude by describing the critical role played by pitch in the human ability to disentangle overlapping voices, as modeled by current work on artificial intelligence.