Pitch Associated with Time Delay between Two Pulse Trains
Arnold McC. Small, Max E. McClellan · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1963
If a series of equally spaced ac or dc pulses is delayed in time with respect to an identical series of pulses, a pitch will be heard corresponding to the reciprocal of the smallest delay between adjacent pulses. This study investigates the precision with which listeners are able to match the pitch of a pure tone to that produced by the time separation in a double pulse train. Ten listeners each made 50 pitch matches for six pulse delays at each pulse repetition rate of 25, 100, and 400 pps. The results indicate that the distribution of pitch matches is centered at the reciprocal of the pulse delay. The dispersion of this distribution seems remarkably small, but tends to widen as pulse delay is shortened, especially at the highest pulse repetition rate. Although the study was not designed for the investigation of all possibilities, no obvious spectral cue seems to exist which would account for the data.