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Re: Effect of duration on pitch perception

Ward, Martin and Erik,

With regard to:
Patterson, R.D., Peters, R.W., Milroy, R., 1983. Threshold duration for
melodic pitch. In: R. Klinke, W. Hartmann (Eds.), Hearing - Physiological
bases and Psychophysics, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 321-25.

My memory is that the explanation in the paper is essentially the same as
Erik's third hypothesis.

Regards Roy P

At 10:21 26/08/2005 -0400, you wrote: 
Third: A (more?) probable reason for the stated difference in latency of
pitch perception between complex tones and pure tones is due to the fact
that a complex tone provides much more pitch information than a pure
tone (because of the additional harmonics). Whether pitch coding is
based on a place/pattern or temporal representation, it is a fairly
simple matter to go through the math (which we won't do here) and show
that the estimate of F0, from a noisy peripheral representation of
harmonic frequencies, increases in accuracy as the number of harmonics
increases. Because we can also assume internal noise (in the neural
processing), the time window that is required to estimate F0 to within
that internal noise limit, from the noisy peripheral representation,
will be lower for a complex tone than a pure tone.


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Roy D. Patterson
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