Coincidence Detection in Pitch Perception

Pitch plays a critical role in the perception of speech prosody, melody of music, and in organizing the acoustic environment into different sources. Like timbre, pitch refers to many distinct percepts with a host of confusing terms. They include “spectral pitch” evoked by sinusoidal signals, “residue pitch” associated with unresolved (high) harmonics, very slow click trains, and envelope of amplitude-modulated noise and sinusoids, and “periodicity pitch” (also known as virtual and missing fundamental pitch) evoked by low order, spectrally resolved harmonic tone complexes. There is general agreement on the distinctive properties of the latter two percepts. For instance, periodicity pitch is more salient than residue pitch, has lower JND’s, and covers a wider frequency range (up to 2000 Hz versus 400 Hz). It is also largely insensitive to the phases of the harmonic complex, and its saliency increases proportional to the number of resolved harmonic components (especially the 2nd-5th harmonics, known as the dominance region).