The lower limit of melodic pitch

Abstract

An objective melody task was used to determine the lower limit of melodic pitch (LLMP) for harmonic complex tones. The LLMP was defined operationally as the repetition rate below which listeners could no longer recognize that one of the notes in a four-note, chromatic melody had changed by a semitone. In the first experiment, the stimuli were broadband tones with all their components in cosine phase, and the LLMP was found to be around 30 Hz. In the second experiment, the tones were filtered into bands about 1 kHz in width to determine the influence of frequency region on the LLMP. The results showed that whenever there was energy present below 800 Hz, the LLMP was still around 30 Hz. When the energy was limited to higher-frequency regions, however, the LLMP increased progressively, up to 270 Hz when the energy was restricted to the region above 3.2 kHz. In the third experiment, the phase relationship between spectral components was altered to determine whether the shape of the waveform affects the LLMP. When the envelope peak factor was reduced using the Schroeder phase relationship, the LLMP was not affected. When a secondary peak was introduced into the envelope of the stimuli by alternating the phase of successive components between two fixed values, there was a substantial reduction in the LLMP, for stimuli containing low-frequency energy. A computational auditory model that extracts pitch information with autocorrelation can reproduce all of the observed effects, provided the contribution of longer time intervals is progressively reduced by a linear weighting function that limits the mechanism to time intervals of less than about 33 ms.

Identification of Harmonic Musical Intervals: The Effect of Pitch Register and Tone Duration

“…Frequency discrimination threshold, expressed as the just noticeable pitch interval in cents, markedly increases with decreasing tone frequency below 200 Hz (Wier et al, 1977;Rakowski, Miśkiewicz, 2002) which means that a tone's pitch becomes less salient and less pronounced than the pitch of higher-frequency tones. Similar findings of a weaker pitch of the low frequency tones were also observed in a study of the pitch strength of musical instrument tones conducted with the use of absolute magnitude estimation method (Rogala, 2008) as well as in the studies in which musically trained listeners identified the notes of a melody made up of synthetic complex tones (Pressnitzer et al, 2001) or musical instrument sound samples (Rogala, 2010).…”

Computational Model Predictions of Cues for Concurrent Vowel Identification

“…The value of tau (ms) was varied per CF based on Cariani (2004; tau=30 ms for CFG100 Hz; tau=16 ms for 100≤CFG440 Hz; tau=12 ms for 440 ≤ CF G880 Hz; tau = 10 ms for 880 ≤ CF G 1320 Hz; tau=9 ms for CF≥1320 Hz). The CFdependent time constants of the exponential functions were designed to account for the lower F0 limit (i.e.,~30 Hz; Pressnitzer et al 2001) and the effect of peripheral filtering on pitch perception (Bernstein and Oxenham 2005). The pooled ACF was then computed by summing across these multiplied ACFs to obtain periodicity information across 100 fibers.…”

Cortical representations of pitch in monkeys and humans

“…In awake marmoset AI, neural responses to stimulus repetition rates below ~40 Hz (near the lower limit of pitch [61,62]) are represented temporally by stimulus-synchronized discharges, while a monotonically tuned rate code is used by another population of neurons to represent higher repetition rates [58]. Neurons with harmonically related multi-peaked frequency response areas have previously been observed in marmoset AI [59], although they differ from pitch-selective neurons in that their primary frequency tuning and harmonic responses are most commonly outside the frequency range of pitch perception, and that they respond to each component of a complex harmonic tone.…”