Re: Effect of duration on pitch perception

[Flemming Vestergaard <FLEMMINGVE@xxxxxxxx>]

If you look at this from a computational point of view, it's clear that a complex tone carries more information than a pure tone.
>From an engineering standpoint, it's clear that you need more time to measure a low frequency tone than a high frequency one.
Quite another effect may stem from the fact that it's uncommon for people to listen to pure tones. These are rather distasting for most people.

I was originally a psychologist (PhD perception), two decades ago, doing something else now, but can anyone explain me what is the actual issue in this discussion?

Flemming Vestergaard
Product Manager
Brüel & Kjær Sound & Vibration Measurement A/S
email: flemmingve@xxxxxxxx
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-----Original Message-----
From: AUDITORY Research in Auditory Perception
[mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Erik Larsen
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 5:32 PM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [AUDITORY] Effect of duration on pitch perception


Roy,

I looked up your paper. Your experiments showed that complex tones
(evoking a residue pitch @ 100 Hz) are perceived about 4 times faster
than pure tones @ 100 Hz (melodic pitch task). The explanation given was
that you need a certain number of complete cycles (~4) to get a definite
pitch percept, and that in a complex tone the higher harmonics complete
many cycles per single cycle of the fundamental, thus providing a much
'faster' pitch percept. That's a little different than my argument, and
furthermore it seems to favor a temporal pitch coding mechanism, if
correct. Your experiments revealed no difference between complex tones
with resolved harmonics and poorly resolved harmonics, which also seems
to favor the temporal mechanism.

So there are at least two different explanations for why a complex tone
would evoke a pitch percept faster than a pure tone, neither of which
are based on traveling wave latencies...

Erik

Roy Patterson wrote:
> 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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