Pitch strength of noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes in normal-hearing listeners.

To study the role of harmonic structure in pitch perception, normal-hearing listeners were tested using noise-vocoded harmonic tone complexes. When tested in a magnitude judgment procedure using vocoded versions generated with 2-128 channels, judgments of pitch strength increased systematically as the number of channels increased and reflected acoustic cues based on harmonic peak-to-valley ratio, but not cues based on periodicity strength. When tested in a fundamental frequency discrimination task, listeners correctly recognized the direction of pitch change with as few as eight noise-vocoded channels. The results suggest that spectral processing contributes substantially to pitch perception in normal-hearing listeners.