On the perception of intonation from sinusoidal signals: Tone height and contour
Robert E. Remez, Philip E. Rubin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1984
Our recent investigations of intonation have employed signals that consist of three or four time-varying sinusoids. Each tone reproduces the changes in formant center frequencies from a natural utterance. Such sentences produce a clear impression of intonation though there is no fundamental frequency common to the sinusoids composing the pattern. We find that the tone corresponding to the first formant is the basis for sinusoidal intonation, much as signal periodicity in the region of the first formant (not coincidentally, the dominance region) provides the information for pitch in natural speech. A series of differential similarity tests was used to determine whether listeners represent sinusoidal intonation as patterns of specific tone heights or as patterns of relative pitch changes. The results are discussed in terms of auditory frequency coding of the speech signal, intonation, whispered speech, and musical pitch. [Supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.]