Pitch of Complex Tones with Many High‐order Harmonics

<div class="line" id="line-253"> Pitch identification and pitch discrimination experiments were performed for complex tones with missing fundamentals between 200 and 300 Hz and with many successive harmonics varying from low (below the 10th) to high (above the 25th) harmonic order. Identification performance was found to degrade with increasing harmonic order from an essentially perfect to an asymptotic level that was clearly less than perfect but much better than chance. Just&hyphen;noticeable differences in (missing) fundamental frequency were found to increase, with increasing harmonic order, from a fraction of 1 Hz to an asymptotic level of about 5 Hz. Influence of phase was found only for tone complexes of high harmonic order. Results support the existence of two separate pitch mechanisms in the auditory system, one based on pattern matching of resolved frequencies, the other on periodicity of nonresolved frequencies.</div>