Pitch perception beyond the traditional existence region of pitch

Abstract

Humans’ ability to recognize musical melodies is generally limited to pure-tone frequencies below 4 or 5 kHz. This limit coincides with the highest notes on modern musical instruments and is widely believed to reflect the upper limit of precise stimulus-driven spike timing in the auditory nerve. We tested the upper limits of pitch and melody perception in humans using pure and harmonic complex tones, such as those produced by the human voice and musical instruments, in melody recognition and pitch-matching tasks. We found that robust pitch perception can be elicited by harmonic complex tones with fundamental frequencies below 2 kHz, even when all of the individual harmonics are above 6 kHz—well above the currently accepted existence region of pitch and above the currently accepted limits of neural phase locking. The results suggest that the perception of musical pitch at high frequencies is not constrained by temporal phase locking in the auditory nerve but may instead stem from higher-level constraints shaped by prior exposure to harmonic sounds.

Pitch strength of noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes in normal-hearing listeners

“…The neural representation of the harmonic spectrum could be a temporal-place representation based on phaselocking of auditory nerve fibers (e.g., Miller and Sachs, 1984). Thus, the results of the present study are not inconsistent with those of recent studies that suggest the importance of phase-locking and fine structure (Moore et al, 2006;Oxenham et al, 2009;Oxenham et al, 2011).…”

“…Current status of the debate favors temporal processing as argued by Yost (2009), and recently the debate has turned to focus more on issues regarding fine structure and envelope (e.g., Moore et al, 2006;Oxenham et al, 2009;Oxenham et al, 2011). The problem of separating spectral and temporal processing is difficult because the spectrum and autocorrelation function (ACF) are Fourier pairs and thus, the spectral and temporal structures of sounds cannot be manipulated independently.…”

Dual-Pitch Processing Mechanisms in Primate Auditory Cortex

“…Computational models relying entirely on a single mechanism are attractive given their ability to predict many pitch phenomena despite their simplicity (Meddis and Hewitt, 1991a,b;Meddis and O'Mard, 1997;Shamma and Klein, 2000;Plack et al, 2005). However, recent psychophysical data demonstrating pitch perception in human subjects for harmonic complex tones with harmonics above the assumed phase-locking limit cast doubt on a purely temporal model to extract pitch (Oxenham et al, 2011). Furthermore, differences in pitch perception have been observed for resolved and unresolved harmonic complex tones, which has lead some researchers to argue that dual-pitch processing mechanisms provide a more parsimonious explanation of these psychophysical data (Shackleton and Carlyon, 1994;Carlyon, 1998).…”

Combined neural and behavioural measures of temporal pitch perception in cochlear implant users

“…These include the potential role of timing differences between the responses of neurons tuned to different characteristic frequencies (CFs) (Shamma, 1985;Moore and Carlyon, 2005;Cedolin and Delgutte, 2010;Carlyon et al, 2012), and whether place-of-excitation cues provide an additional mechanism for encoding musical pitch (Oxenham et al, 2011). The analysis of the pitch perceived when such cues are absent provides a way of studying within-channel temporal processing in isolation, and may provide insight both into the nature of that processing and of more general accounts of pitch.…”