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

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