Pitch without Place?

Revisiting place and temporal theories of pitch.

The nature of pitch and its neural coding have been studied for over a century. A popular debate has revolved around the question of whether pitch is coded via "place" cues in the cochlea, or via timing cues in the auditory nerve. In the most recent incarnation of this debate, the role of temporal fine structure has been emphasized in conveying important pitch and speech information, particular...

Contributions of temporal and place cues in pitch perception in absolute pitch possessors.

Pitch perception is determined by both place and temporal cues. To explore whether the manner in which these cues are used differs depending on absolute pitch capability, pitch identification experiments with and without pitch references were conducted for subjects with different absolute pitch capabilities and musical experience. Three types of stimuli were used to manipulate place and tempora...

Combining rate and place information for robust pitch extraction

In this paper we propose an algorithm for the robust extraction of pitch combining both temporal (rate) and pattern matching (place) techniques. Following a transformation into the spectral domain via the application of a Gammatone filter bank the rate information is extracted in each band via the zero crossing distances in that band. Next a comb filter with teeth at the harmonics of the curren...

Learning Pitch with STDP: A Computational Model of Place and Temporal Pitch Perception Using Spiking Neural Networks

Pitch perception is important for understanding speech prosody, music perception, recognizing tones in tonal languages, and perceiving speech in noisy environments. The two principal pitch perception theories consider the place of maximum neural excitation along the auditory nerve and the temporal pattern of the auditory neurons' action potentials (spikes) as pitch cues. This paper describes a ...

Speech Accommodation Without Priming: The Case of Pitch