Abstract
Pitch is a fundamental attribute in auditory perception involved in source identification and segregation, music, and speech understanding. Pitch percepts are intimately related to harmonic resolvability of sound. When harmonics are well-resolved, the induced pitch is usually salient and precise, and several models relying on autocorrelations or harmonic spectral templates can account for these percepts. However, when harmonics are not completely resolved, the pitch percept becomes less salient, poorly discriminated, with upper range limited to a few hundred hertz, and spectral templates fail to convey percept since only temporal cues are available. Here, a biologically-motivated model is presented that combines spectral and temporal cues to account for both percepts. The model explains how temporal analysis to estimate the pitch of the unresolved harmonics is performed by bandpass filters implemented by resonances in dendritic trees of neurons in the early auditory pathway. It is demonstrated that organizing and exploiting such dendritic tuning can occur spontaneously in response to white noise. This paper then shows how temporal cues of unresolved harmonics may be integrated with spectrally resolved harmonics, creating spectro-temporal harmonic templates for all pitch percepts. Finally, the model extends its account of monaural pitch percepts to pitches evoked by dichotic binaural stimuli.
Highlights
Pitch is the basic attribute of sound that conveys musical melody and contributes to speaker identity and speech prosody
We focus here on the pitch evoked by harmonic complexes of different fundamental frequencies
The pitch induced by such harmonics is salient, well-discriminated, with a perceived value corresponding to the fundamental of the complex regardless of whether the fundamental and other nearby harmonics are present or absent
Summary
Pitch is the basic attribute of sound that conveys musical melody and contributes to speaker identity and speech prosody. “temporal models” [Fig. 1(b)] focus on the periodic structure of the phase-locked responses to all harmonics, and propose computations that directly estimate them, unifying the extraction of the resolved and unresolved pitch percepts. These models (e.g., the Auto-Correlogram[16,21,22] and others14,15,23) can explain most of the perceptual properties of resolved and unresolved pitch, including the weak saliency of unresolved pitch and its poor resolution, and the limited range of pitch up to a few hundred hertz.[13]. We (5) offer a discussion of the physiological evidence of such a model, and ideas for how it might be tested, ending with (6) a brief account of how distinct binaural pitches are consistent with this model
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