Pitch Perception

Project Description

Pitch, along with loudness and timbre, is one of the fundamental auditory percepts. It is crucial for our appreciation of music and plays a vital role in speech perception. Most importantly perhaps, differences in pitch are used by the auditory system to segregate competing sounds. Our work concentrates on the perception and neural coding of single and multiple pitches in people with normal hearing, impaired hearing, and cochlear implants. We use a combination of behavioral techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalograhy (EEG), and computational modeling.

Selected publications

Mehta AH, Lu H, Oxenham AJ (2020). The perception of multiple simultaneous pitches as a function of number of spectral channels and spectral spread in a noise-excited envelope vocoder. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol 21:61-72. PMCID: PPMC7062949.

Guest DR, Oxenham AJ (2019). The role of pitch and harmonic cancellation when listening to speech in harmonic background sounds. J Acoust Soc Am 145:3011. PMCID: PPMC6529328.

Whiteford KL, Oxenham AJ (2018). Learning for pitch and melody discrimination in congenital amusia. Cortex 103:164-178. PMCID: PPMC5988957.