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Re: Discussion about "place pitch" concept
Concerning Andy Oxenham's great paper, I would venture to propose that
Steve Greenberg and I presented a similar phenomenon some nine years ago.
This teaches us procrastinating with publishing...
From Abstracts from the 1995 ARO meeting:
The residue reconsidered: Isolating temporal cues for the low
pitch of complex tones.
S. Greenberg, University of California, Berkeley, and International
Computer Science Institute, P.L. Divenyi, Veterans Affairs Medical
Center, Martinez, CA
A.P. Algazi, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Martinez, CA
For well over a century and a half, auditory theorists have debated the
relative contribution of spectral and temporal cues towards the formation
of low pitch. The issue remains
unresolved, in part, because temporal cues (the "residue") are
difficult to isolate, due to their inherent association with the spectrum
and their correlation with tonotopic location.
In order to gauge the contribution of purely temporal cues in the low
pitch of complex signals, we use signals in which a 150-ms sinuoidal
carrier (of frequency fc) is amplitude-modulated (AM) by a sinusoid of
frequency fmod1 which has been amplitude-modulated by a sinusoid of
frequency fmod2. The ratio fmod1/fmod2 is similar to the
carrier/modulator ratio of AM signals known to produce a distinct low
pitch sensation. Measuring psychophysically, in an adaptive 2AFC
paradigm, the discriminability of the pitch generated by fmod2, allows us
to project the fine temporal structure associated with
pitch-salient low-frequency AM signals to the mid- and high-frequency
regions of the tonotopic gradient (at 4 kHz and above) where neural
phase-locking to the carrier frequency is largely absent. Because the two
modulating frequencies are within the phase-locking limit, temporal
characteristics of the resulting excitation pattern are similar to those
associated with low-frequency AM signals. The low pitch discriminability
of these dual-modulation
signals is comparable to that of conventional AM and sinusoidal signals
over a wide range of modulator ratios and carrier frequencies, suggesting
that temporal cues, based on neural phase-locking, play an important role
in the coding of low pitch.