Exploring the temporal mechanism involved in the pitch of unresolved harmonics

This paper continues a line of research initiated by Kaernbach and Demany [ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 104, 2298-2306 (1998)], who employed filtered click seq uences to explore the temporal mechanism involved in the pitch of unresolve d harmonics. In a first experiment, the just noticeable difference (jnd) fo r the fundamental frequency (FO) of high-pass filtered and low-pass masked click trains was measured, with F0 (100 to 250 Hz) and the cut frequency (0 .5 to 6 kHz) being varied orthogonally. The data confirm the result of Hout sma and Smurzynski [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 87, 304-310 (1990)] that a pitch me chanism working on the temporal structure of the signal is responsible for analyzing frequencies higher than ten times the fundamental. Using high-pas s filtered click trains, however, the jnd for the temporal analysis is at 1 .2% as compared to 2%-3% found in studies using band-pass filtered stimuli. Two further experiments provide evidence that the pitch of this stimulus c an convey musical information. A fourth experiment replicates the finding o f Kaernbach and Demany on first-and second-order regularities with a cut fr equency of 2 kHz and extends the paradigm to binaural aperiodic click seque nces. The result suggests that listeners can detect first-order temporal re gularities in monaural click streams as well as in binaurally fused click s treams. (C) 2001 Acoustical Society of America.