Pitch in speech and music: Is there a single concept?
Adrianus J. M. Houtsma · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1990
The ANSI definition of pitch makes no distinction between conditions of speech sounds and music. Pitch behavior, on the other hand, shows numerous similarities but also peculiar differences for speech and music conditions. For both conditions the concept of virtual pitch, i.e., the holistically perceived pitch corresponding to the fundamental frequency, regardless of the physical presence of such a fundamental, plays an important role. When pitches are perceptually scaled, however, musicians tend to associate identical pitch intervals with roughly equal frequency ratios, which leads to a musical scale of equal log-frequency steps, whereas equality judgments of tonal accents in speech results in a critical-band scale, in principal similar to Stevens' and Zwicker's mel scale. When two simultaneous sounds are preceived, a paradoxical situation between speech and music is also found. Whereas it is easier to recognize two simultaneous vowels with a different fundamental (f0) than two vowels with the same f0, it is also easier to identify the pitches (f0's) of two simultaneous complex tones with overlapping spectral components than it is to recognize the virtual pitches of tones with spectral components in very different frequency regions. These perceptual findings should caution us not to treat pitch of speech and music too lightly as one and the same concept.