Three Experiments Concerned with Pitch Perception
Georg von Békésy · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1963
Three experiments indicate that the place of the excitation along the basilar membrane determines pitch perception. (1) Without changing the periodicity of a tone, its pitch can be raised or lowered by masking. (2) The changes in the size of a sound image produced by masking can be explained in terms of the place theory of hearing. (3) Pitch sensations seem to be connected in an orderly way to place of excitation along the basilar membrane, since it is possible to observe the time differences required by the traveling waves to reach the different places along the membrane.