Effects of spectral resolution and temporal envelope periodicity on musical pitch discrimination

The main goal of this study was to systematically investigate the relative contributions of spectral resolution and temporal envelope periodicity to musical pitch discrimination.Stimuli from four instruments(clarinet,trumpet, piano and violin) and synthetic complex tones were utilized.A noise-excited vocoder was used to control the spectral resolution and temporal periodicity of the musical stimuli.Ten normal-hearing subjects were recruited for the study. Psychoacoustic experiments on pitch discrimination were carried out.Resultsshowed that the spectral cue is important for musical pitch discrimination.Relative good performance can be achieved when there were 16 frequency channels. No clear trend was found for the temporal periodicity to pitch discrimination.