Pitch shifts during pure-tone adaptation

Abstract

Pitches associated with pure-tone stimuli were measured during gaps in an adaptation tone by a binaural matching technique. The adaptation tone was a sinusoid of moderate loudness presented to one ear at a frequency either very close to or very distant from the test stimuli. During 12-sec gaps in the adaptation tone, listeners adjusted a variable test tone in one ear to match the pitch of a constant comparison tone in the other ear, listening to the test and comparison tones in rapid alternation. With the adaptation tone in the frequency neighborhood of the test stimuli, a small (3% or less) pitch shift was observed. In general, this shift is in a direction which increases the apparent frequency difference between test and adaptation stimuli. This result is in qualitative agreement with similar experiments on the resolution of spatial frequency in vision.