Pitch and stimulus fine structure

It has often been suggested that the pitch of a complex tone is given by the inverse of the time between peaks in the fine structure of the stimulus waveform. This paper argues that in view of recent empirical evidence such a position is untenable. Fine-structure models of pitch such as the “peak-picker” are phase sensitive; they predict that changes in stimulus fine structure will be accompanied by changes in pitch. Results from several pitch-matching experiments do not support this prediction. Two experiments are described in which pitch matches were made to complex-tone stimuli presented in several different phase configurations. In both experiments the distributions of pitch matches appeared to be the same for all phase configurations. Stimulus fine structure, of course, changed dramatically with phase. Of course, the fact that pitch is insensitive to the relative phases of the stimulus components does not mean that listeners cannot hear the phase changes. In many cases stimuli with the same pitch are perfectly discriminable. It is only pitch that appears to be insensitive to details of wave form fine structure. This leads us to reject the simple fine-structure theories of pitch.