Re: Minimum duration required in a sinusoid to hear pitch

[Richard Pastore <pastore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Beauchamp's note about his responses not getting
circulated made me think that the following also did not get
circulated.

Originally sent on Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 11:33:11 -0500
To: AUDITORY Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Richard Pastore <pastore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Minimum duration required in a sinusoid to hear pitch

     Massimo has already provided the references to Roy Patterson's work, which is the more recent.  Most people don't bother looking at the classic work , but there was some excellent work done by early researchers.  The classic work on duration threshold for pitch is listed below.   
      Don't forget that the spectrum of a segment of a sinusoid is not a single frequency, but a sinc function whose bandwidth is inversely proportional to duration.  There is a discussion of this in Licklider's classic chapter in Stevens' Handbook from the 1950s.
        Dick Pastore


Doughty, J.  M.,  & Garner, W.  R.  (1947).  Pitch characteristics of short tones.  I.  Two kinds of pitch thresholds. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37, 351-365.
Doughty, J.  M.,  & Garner, W.  R.  (1948).  Pitch characteristics of short tones.  II.  Pitch as a function of tone duration.  Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 478-494.

        ---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------

I would like to know if there exists some research done about the
minimum duration that a sinusoid has to have in order to hear pitch.
Any reference to related literature will be highly appreciated.

as far as I know there are two works but the timbre was complex:

Robinson, K.L. and Patterson, R.D. (1995) "The duration required to identify
the instrument, the octave, or the pitch-chroma of a musical note," Music
Perception 13, 1-15.

Robinson, K.L. and Patterson, R.D. (1995) "The stimulus duration required to
identify vowels, their octave, and their pitch-chroma," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 98,
1858-1865.

The interesting result is that, when compared to vision, the auditory system
extracts first complex features (i.e. timbre) and later simple features (i.e.
octave and chroma). It seems that the visual system operates in the opposite
way (e.g. Marr, 1982): first simple features then complex features.

I hope this helps,
m

********************
Massimo Grassi - PhD
Laboratorio di Psicologia
Via Petracco 8 - 33100 Udine - Italy
http://www.psy.unipd.it/~grassi

----------------------------------------------------------------------
SEMEL (SErvizio di Messaging ELettronico) - CSIT -Universita' di Udine

Richard E. Pastore
  Professor of Psychology
  Psychology Department
  Binghamton University (SUNY)
  Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
   http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~pastore