The effect of phase and spectral envelope position in the perception of pitch
Résumé
Pitch perception is usually described with two dimensions: chroma and height. Chroma is related to the temporal periodicity of sound, whereas height is related to the distribution of the energy over frequency. In this study, we manipulated a temporal parameter (phase) and a spectral parameter (envelope position), and measured their effect on pitch judgments. Shifting the phase of the odd harmonics of a cosine phase harmonic tone increased the tone height and eventually led to a shift of almost one octave in the perception. Shifting the spectral envelope up (or down) produced an increase (or decrease) in tone height perception. Our study included psychometric functions for pitch as a function of: 1) phase shift alone; 2) spectral envelope shift alone; 3) phase shift and envelope shift. Interestingly, we observed a strong interaction between the phase shift and the envelope on the perception of pitch.