PITCH, PERIODICITY, AND AUDITORY ORGANIZATION

The perception of pitch forms the basis of musical melody and harmony. It is also among the most precise of all our human senses, and with i magination, this precision can be used experimentally to investigate t he functioning of the auditory system. This tutorial presents auditory demonstrations from the zoo of pitch effects: pitch shifts, noise pit ch, virtual pitch, dichotic pitch, and the pitches of things that are not there at all. It introduces models of auditory processing, derived from contemporary psychoacoustics and auditory physiology, and tests these models against the experimental effects. It concludes by describ ing the critical role played by pitch in the important human ability t o disentangle overlapping sources of sound. (C) 1996 Acoustical Societ y of America.