Sharing place, period, and concepts with Licklider
Ira J. Hirsh, Punita G. Singh · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1991
The nature of pitch as a dual attribute comprising both “place” and “period” aspects was dramatically illustrated by Licklider [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 26, 945 (1954)] in his famous masking demonstration. Listener confusions in judgments of pitch in subsequent experiments could be attributed to conflicting “place” and “period” information. Although the concept of pitch duality has been updated by pitch theorists, one aspect that has been consistently overlooked is the relation between “place” or “spectral” pitch and timbre. For example, the direction of a perceived pitch change is often confused with an ordinal aspect of timbre, like “brightness” and “sharpness.” The connection between “place” pitch and timbre will be discussed and demonstrated with examples from the literature and from our own experiments. [Work supported by USAFOSR and NIH.]