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Pitch Perception, Models

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience

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Definition

Pitch is a fundamental perceptual quality of an acoustic stimulus, perhaps not unlike color is a fundamental quality of a visual stimulus. It is very important to remember that pitch is a subjective quality that is constructed in the brain of a listener, not a physical quality of a sound wave. This subjective quality makes precise definitions troublesome. The American National Standards Institute defined pitch as “that attribute of sound which allows sounds to be ordered on a scale from high to low.” However, this definition is problematic because it remains mute about who or what is supposed to do the ordering, and as we shall see, there can be more than one “up” direction. Perhaps a more useful operational definition is to think of pitch as that property which carries melody in music. With that definition in mind, sounds can be assigned a pitch valuewhich could be specified in terms of the corresponding “musical note” (e.g., A4) or equivalently in terms of the...

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Further Reading

  • Schnupp J, Nelken I et al (2011) Auditory neuroscience: making sense of sound. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London, Chapter 3

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Medical Sciences Division, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Prof. Jan Schnupp

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  1. Prof. Jan Schnupp
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Correspondence to Jan Schnupp .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Ranu Jung

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Schnupp, J. (2014). Pitch Perception, Models. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_434-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_434-2

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6

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