Further examination of complex pitch perception in the absence of a place--rate match

Abstract

Oxenham et al. [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 101, 1421-1425 (2004)] reported that listeners cannot derive a "missing fundamental" from three transposed tones having high carrier frequencies and harmonically related low-frequency modulators. This finding was attributed to complex pitch perception requiring correct tonotopic representation but could have been due to the very high modulator rate difference limens (DLs) observed for individual transposed tones. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that much lower DLs could be obtained for bandpass-filtered pulse trains than for transposed tones with repetition rates of 100 or 300 pps; however, DLs were still larger than for low-frequency pure tones. Experiment 3 presented three pulse trains filtered between 1375 and 1875, 3900 and 5400, and 7800 and 10 800 Hz simultaneously with a pink-noise background. Listeners could not compare the "missing fundamental" of a stimulus in which the pulse rates were, respectively, 150, 225, and 300 pps, to one where all pulse trains had a rate of 75 pps, even though they could compare a 150 + 225 + 300 Hz complex tone to a 75-Hz pure tone. Hence although filtered pulse trains can produce fairly good pitch perception of simple stimuli having low repetition rates and high-frequency spectral content, no evidence that such stimuli enable complex pitch perception in the absence of a place-rate match was found.