The role of temporal fine structure in harmonic segregation through mistuning.

Bernstein and Oxenham [(2008). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124, 1653-1667] measured thresholds for discriminating the fundamental frequency, F0, of a complex tone that was passed through a fixed bandpass filter. They found that performance worsened when the F0 was decreased so that only harmonics above the tenth were audible. However, performance in this case was improved by mistuning the odd harmonics by 3%. Bernstein and Oxenham considered whether the results could be explained in terms of temporal fine structure information available at the output of a single auditory filter and concluded that their results did not appear to be consistent with such an explanation. Here, it is argued that such cues could have led to the improvement in performance produced by mistuning the odd harmonics.