Measurement of pitch by subharmonic summation

In order to account for the phenomenon of virtual pitch, various theories assume implicitly or explicitly that each spectral component introduces a series of subharmonics. The spectral-compression method for pitch determination can be viewed as a direct implementation of this principle. This, as well as some other related pitch-determination algorithms, suffer from numerical problems that impede their widespread implementation. A modified algorithm, called subharmonic summation, is described that solves this problem. The result outperforms the harmonic-sieve method for pitch determination, while its computational requirements are about the same. It is argued that this favourable performance stems from the correspondence between the subharmonic-summation algorithm and current pitch-perception theories.