What Is the Cochlear Place Code for Pitch?

The advent of cochlear implants has increased the clinical interest in the cochlear code for pitch. It is widely believed that pitch is determined by the location of the excitation maximum in the cochlea. However, direct recordings from cochlear hair cells indicate that, for a given sound frequency, the location changes appreciably with sound intensity, whereas the corresponding pitch remains approximately constant. Correlated with this constancy is a surprising constancy of the location of the high-frequency cutoff of cochlear excitation.