Dynamics of pitch perception in the auditory cortex

Abstract The ability to perceive pitch allows human listeners to experience music, recognize the identity and emotion conveyed by conversational partners, and make sense of their auditory environment. A pitch percept is formed by weighting different acoustic cues (e.g., signal fundamental frequency and inter-harmonic spacing) and contextual cues (expectation). How and when such cues are neurally encoded and integrated remains debated. In this study, twenty-eight participants (16 female) listened to tone sequences with different acoustic cues (pure tones, complex missing fundamental tones, and tones with an ambiguous mixture), placed in predictable and less predictable sequences, while magnetoencephalography was recorded. Decoding analyses revealed that pitch was encoded in neural responses to all three tone types, in the low-to-mid auditory cortex and sensorimotor cortex bilaterally, with right-hemisphere dominance. The pattern of activity generalized across cue-types, offset in time: pitch was neurally encoded earlier for harmonic tones (∼85ms) than pure tones (∼95ms). For ambiguous tones, pitch emerged significantly earlier in predictable contexts than unpredictable. The results suggest that a unified neural representation of pitch emerges by integrating independent pitch cues, and that context alters the dynamics of pitch generation when acoustic cues are ambiguous. Significance Statement Pitch enables humans to enjoy music, understand the emotional intent of a conversational partner, distinguish lexical items in tonal languages, and make sense of the acoustic environment. The study of pitch has lasted over a century, with conflicting accounts of how and when the brain integrates spectrotemporal information to map different sound sources onto a single and stable pitch percept. Our results answer crucial questions about the emergence of perceptual pitch in the brain: namely, that place and temporal cues to pitch seem to be accounted for by early auditory cortex, that a common representation of perceptual pitch emerges early in the right hemisphere, and that the temporal dynamics of pitch representations are modulated by expectation.