Abstract
Sinewave Speech (SWS), consisting of several frequency-modulated sinusoids representing vocal tract formants, elicits perception of words/sentences, making it useful for studying the perceptual basis of speech. However, SWS contains no information relevant for pitch perception, making it a poor tool for investigating tone languages or prosody (Remez & Rubin, 1993, JASA94; Rosen & Hui, 2015, JASA138). The objective of this study was to develop a method for creating modified SWS replicas adding a minimal cue for pitch. The lowest sinusoid was replaced with a “modified Shepard tone:” a tone formed from a bandpass whose center frequency tracks F1, wide enough at any timepoint for exactly two harmonics of an independently specified f0 contour. It has been shown (Ritsma 1962, JASA34, Smoorenburg 1970, JASA48, Houtgast 1976, JASA60) that tones consisting of 1–3 harmonics elicit perception of a missing fundamental. An initial experiment confirmed that a bandpass whose center frequency fell from 700 to 400 Hz over 400 ms, intersected with harmonics of a rising f0 (85–185 Hz), elicited a strong perception of a rising contour, and vice versa. A second experiment replaced F1 in a set of SWS replicas with these two-component tones and elicited robust perception of contrasting pitch contours.Sinewave Speech (SWS), consisting of several frequency-modulated sinusoids representing vocal tract formants, elicits perception of words/sentences, making it useful for studying the perceptual basis of speech. However, SWS contains no information relevant for pitch perception, making it a poor tool for investigating tone languages or prosody (Remez & Rubin, 1993, JASA94; Rosen & Hui, 2015, JASA138). The objective of this study was to develop a method for creating modified SWS replicas adding a minimal cue for pitch. The lowest sinusoid was replaced with a “modified Shepard tone:” a tone formed from a bandpass whose center frequency tracks F1, wide enough at any timepoint for exactly two harmonics of an independently specified f0 contour. It has been shown (Ritsma 1962, JASA34, Smoorenburg 1970, JASA48, Houtgast 1976, JASA60) that tones consisting of 1–3 harmonics elicit perception of a missing fundamental. An initial experiment confirmed that a bandpass whose center frequency fell from 700 to 400 Hz over...
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