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Presentation
Pitch of Complex Tones with Many High‐order Harmonics
117th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (1989)
  • Adrianus J. M. Houtsma, Institute for Perception Research IPO
  • J. Smurzynski, University of Connecticut Health Center
Abstract
Pitch identification and pitch discrimination experiments were performed for complex tones with missing fundamentals between 200 and 300 Hz and with many successive harmonics varying from low (below the 10th) to high (above the 25th) harmonic order. Identification performance was found to degrade with increasing harmonic order from an essentially perfect to an asymptotic level that was clearly less than perfect but much better than chance. Just‐noticeable differences in (missing) fundamental frequency were found to increase, with increasing harmonic order, from a fraction of 1 Hz to an asymptotic level of about 5 Hz. Influence of phase was found only for tone complexes of high harmonic order. Results support the existence of two separate pitch mechanisms in the auditory system, one based on pattern matching of resolved frequencies, the other on periodicity of nonresolved frequencies.
Keywords
  • acoustics,
  • auditory system,
  • timbre
Publication Date
January 5, 1989
Comments
Copyright 1989 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America.

The following article appeared in Adrianus J. M. Houtsm and Jacek Smurzynski, Pitch of complex tones with many high‐order harmonics, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 85 (1989) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2026776
Citation Information
Adrianus J. M. Houtsma and J. Smurzynski. "Pitch of Complex Tones with Many High‐order Harmonics" 117th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (1989)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jacek-smurzynski/24/