The role of aural frequency analysis in pitch perception with simultaneous complex tones

Pitch perception has always been a relatively important issue in psychoacoustic literature. In particular the problem of complex-tone pitch, which does not simply depend on any single spectral frequency, has been the object of much interest during the past century. Since Seebeck (1841) discovered that upper partials contribute significantly to the pitch of complex tones, several mechanisms have been proposed such as nonlinear distortion creating a difference tone (Helmholtz, 1863; Fletcher, 1924), interference between unresolved partials causing a periodic envelope pattern (Schouten, 1940; Plomp, 1967), or some form of central neural processing (Goldstein, 1973; Wightman, 1973; Terhardt, 1972). Most modern pitch theories agree that the pitch of a complex tone is directly or indirectly derived from spectral frequencies which are resolved in the cochlea.