2019.04.17 Prof. Jan Schnupp

Department of Biomedical Sciences

City University of Hong Kong

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The auditory neuroscience of pitch

The "pitch", or "tone height" of a sound is defined by the ANSI as "the quality of sound, other than loudness, which can be ordered on a scale from high to low", and many introductory neuroscience textbooks simply note that pure tones of increasing frequency stimulate more and more basal parts of the auditory nerve fiber array, often implying that the resulting tonotopic frequency map can explain pitch perception by "place coding“ resulting from systematic shifts in neural population activity. In my talk I will explain why the  psychoacoustics and neurobiology of pitch encoding and pitch perception is actually a great deal more complicated, but also richer and more interesting than these simple notions suggest. I will present examples such as missing fundamental sounds to explain why simple place codes are insufficient, and examples from studies of cochlear implantees to explain why temporal encoding of the periodic structure of sounds are likely to be at least as important for pitch perception as place codes. I will then briefly review some animal work that has shed light on the encoding of pitch in the central nervous system, and will discuss the relevance of the ideas presented to  speech processing and neuroprosthetics.