This thesis deals with the perception of pitch of speech signals and ways to measure this pitch. The term 'pitch' is used as a collective term for speech production (where it is used for the fundamental frequency of quasi-periodically vibrating vocal folds), for acoustic transmission (where it is used for the periodicity of signals), and for speech perception (where it is used for the perceived...

Music processing is influenced by pitch perception and memory. Additionally these features interact, with pitch memory performance decreasing as the perceived distance between two pitches decreases. This study examined whether or not the difficulty of pitch discrimination influences pitch retention by testing individuals with congenital amusia. Pitch discrimination difficulty was equated by det...

There has been experimental evidence pointing to at least two pitch mechanisms, the first involving low-order harmonics that are resolved along the basilar membrane, and the second a periodicity mechanism that depends only on the repetition rate of the time waveform on the basilar membrane. If this time waveform is derived from repeated bursts of sinusoidal tone, the second mechanism might be t...

A prerequisite for establishing links between genes and musical behaviors is to characterize the neural substrates underlying such behaviors. This presentation will summarize some of the crucial functional and anatomical specializations of the human brain that may be relevant. In particular, we will emphasize studies of two important music-related abilities: pitch and rhythm. The neural substra...

Objective measures of musical tempo are linked to a particular metrical pulse, and this is most likely true for subjective tempo as well. Therefore, tapping along with a rhythm should be predictive of relative tempo judgments. The difficulty of such judgments may lie in the choice of a particular metrical level as the referent. Multiple levels may compete and create ambiguity. Analogies are dra...

A sinusoidal replica of a sentence evokes a clear impression of intonation despite the absence of the primary acoustic correlate of intonation, the fundamental frequency. Our previous studies employed a test of differential similarity to determine that the tone analog of the first formant is a probable acoustic correlate of sinusoidal sentence intonation. Though the typical acoustic and percept...

Musical pitch-time relations were explored by investigating the effect of temporal variation on pitch perception. In Experiment 1, trained musicians heard a standard tone followed by a tonal context and then a comparison tone. They then performed one of two tasks. In the cognitive task, they indicated whether the comparison tone was in the key of the context. In the perceptual task, they judged...

Music and speech both feature structured melodic patterns, yet these patterns are rarely compared using empirical methods. One reason for this has been a lack of tools which allow quantitative comparisons of spoken and musical pitch sequences. Recently, a new model of speech intonation perception has been proposed based on principles of pitch perception in speech. The “prosogram” model converts...

Temporal models of pitch and harmonic segregation call for delays of up to 30 ms to cover the full range of existence of musical pitch. To date there is little anatomical or physiological evidence for delays that long. We propose a mechanism by which delays may be synthesized from cross-channel phase interaction. Phases of adjacent cochlear filter channels are shifted by an amount proportional ...

A monaural complex tone is synthesized from 12 harmonically related pure tones, played in phase. In each of 12 segments, one of the tones (the target) is played out of phase so that the sequence of targets is increasing or decreasing in frequency. If the target is at least 30 degrees out of phase, the targets are perceptually segregated. This tone-segregation by phase raises doubts concerning s...