Subject: Re: Effect of duration on pitch perception From: Roy Patterson <roy.patterson(at)MRC-CBU.CAM.AC.UK> Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:44:12 +0100 X-Cam-ScannerInfo:http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/scanner/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. * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** Roy D. Patterson Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing NOTE: 10 April through 1 November, 2005, The CNBH will be temporarily housed on the top floor of the Craik-Marshall Building on the Downing Site. The Physiology Building is being renovated. My Room number is 317 and my phone number is 333936 My fax, email and web addresses are unchanged, and they are listed below Physiology Department, University of Cambridge Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EG phone 44 (1223) 333819 office fax 44 (1223) 333840 department email rdp1(at)cam.ac.uk or email roy.patterson(at)mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~roy.patterson http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/cnbh