Auditory Psychophysics

Abstract

In this contribution, I have tried to evade the Scylla of a critical but too specifi c review and the Charybdis of a general but too uncritical review by partly giving' way to both dangers. The fi rst half of the allocated space is used for a critical discussion on the origin of the low pitch of complex sounds. Referring to the proceedings of the 1969 Driebergen symposium (162), largely devoted to that question, Harris (87) wrote in his 1972 review on audition that "probably at least 3 years more should elapse before another review would be useful." Even though this period has barely expired, the present reviewer nonetheless feels that there is an urgent need for a reconsideration of the pitch problem in the light of recent experimental evidence. If von Bekesy (246) was right in stating that, to some extent, our so-called theories of hearing are actually only theories of pitch perception, this may be a sufficient argument to devote half of this review to it. The second half is used for a general survey of other major topics of auditory psychophysics. THE LOW PITCH OF COMPLEX SOUNDSComplex sounds as produced by musical instruments and the vocal cords are characterized by a pitch equal to the pitch of the fundamental. According to their experimental conditions, or their preferred explanations, authors have referred to this pitch as residue pitch, periodicity pitch, time-separation pitch, repetition pitch, virtual pitch, etc. I will adopt in this review the term low pitch as a more neutral denotation for the pitch of complex sounds. 1 With a few exceptions, only papers published in the years 1970 through 1973 are considered in this review. Articles not directly referring to the low pitch of complex sounds but related to subjects brought up in the discussion on the origin of low pitch are included in that part of the review. Limited space obliged me to leave out such subjects as speech perception, auditory memory, signal detection theory, temporal threshold shifts, and studies on animals. For the same reason, papers published in the Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress on Acoustics, Budapest 1971, were excluded. 207Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1975.26:207-232. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by McGill University on 02/05/15. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1975.26:207-232. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by McGill University on 02/05/15. For personal use only. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1975.26:207-232. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by McGill University on 02/05/15. For personal use only. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 1975.26:207-232. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by McGill University on 02/05/15. For personal use only.

Storing covariance with nonlinearly interacting neurons

“…Temporal information in the auditory nerve discharges may also have an important role in pitch perception (Plomp, 1975). In the somatosensory system, information coded as interspike intervals can apparently be used for perceiving the frequency of flutter-vibration (Mountcastle, 1967), and some central neurons fire with preferred interspike intervals even under normal conditions (Amassian and Giblin, 1974).…”

Uncertainty concerning the direct use of time information in hearing: Place clues in white-spectra stimuli

“…May they not give the ear a clue, also, as some unchanging periodic features give a residue pitch (Schouten, 1940;Schouten etal., 1962;Plomp, 1975) or repetition pitch (Bilsen,…”

Improved Perception of Music With a Harmonic Based Algorithm for Cochlear Implants

“…Because most CI users can only perceive temporal information up to approximately 300 Hz [26], [27], the harmonics were transposed to half the in our experiments. Compared with the envelope-based CIS strategy, HSSE represents better the temporal coding mechanism in the normal auditory system [19], [21], and yielded markedly better performance on the simulated melody recognition test. The fact that little difference between 4-and 8-channel conditions was found for melody recognition suggests that with a small number of channels, the place cues were too coarse to assist discrimination.…”

“…For a harmonic complex sound, such as voiced speech or music, which consists of a series of harmonically related tones that are integer multiples of a common fundamental frequency , the elicited pitch percept is unified and associated with the regardless of the relative amplitude of harmonics. Because lower harmonics can be resolved on the basilar membrane and encoded by the auditory nerve at specific places, pitch is assumed to be derived from the place information about individual harmonics [19]. Alternatively, temporal models assert that pitch is related to the time intervals between auditory neural spikes, because higher harmonics cannot be well separated on the basilar membrane and the of a complex waveform can be derived by pooling timing information across neural fibers regardless of place cues [20].…”