Pitch strength of noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes in normal-hearing listeners.

J Acoust Soc Am

Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 South Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.

Published: November 2012

To study the role of harmonic structure in pitch perception, normal-hearing listeners were tested using noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes. When tested in a magnitude judgment procedure using vocoded versions generated with 2-128 channels, judgments of pitch strength increased systematically as the number of channels increased and reflected acoustic cues based on harmonic peak-to-valley ratio, but not cues based on periodicity strength. When tested in a fundamental frequency discrimination task, listeners correctly recognized the direction of pitch change with as few as eight noise-vocoded channels. The results suggest that spectral processing contributes substantially to pitch perception in normal-hearing listeners.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482252PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4757697DOI Listing

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