On the Duifhuis pitch effect
Jian-Yu Lin, William M. Hartmann · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1997
An effect discovered by Duifhuis [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 48, 888-893 (1970)], wherein an omitted high harmonic of a periodic complex tone is found to have an audible pitch, is extended to a variety of new broadband signal conditions. The effect is found to exist for flat spectra and spectra decreasing at 6 dB/octave, independent of phases as long as they are constant. The effect exists for alternating phases and Schroeder phases. It can generate a missing-fundamental pitch. Pitch and loudness matching experiments support the status of the omitted harmonic as an objective tone in the signal. Further experiments using narrower bands challenge the traditional explanation for the effect, which attributes it to short-term frequency analysis by peripheral auditory filters. Instead, the experiments suggest that different peripheral channels must be combined, maintaining some phase information, to generate the effect.