Pitch salience of various complex sounds
Adrianus J. M. Houtsma · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1981
Pitch properties have been reported in the literature for a variety of different sounds. The relative salience of several of these pitch effects was examined through an open-set melody dictation test using several musically trained subjects. The task was to identify on each trial all the notes of a four-note melody, randomly selected from an eight-note diatonic major scale (do-do), by playing them back on a keyboard. The sounds included pure tones, three-tone complexes of random simultaneous and of random time-sequential harmonics, echoed pulses, sinusoidally modulated noise, and 400-Hz wide bandpass noise. Pitch salience was measured by the correlation between the (quantified) melody and response patterns. For pure tones, a criterion of better than 90% correlation determined the fitness of a subjects for this experiment. Measured correlation values ranged from near 100% for pure tones or complexes of simultaneous harmonics to about 50% for complexes of time-sequential harmonics, with intermediate values for the other sounds. Pros and cons of the dictation method are discussed. [Work supported by NIH, Grant NS 11680.]