Amplitude-modulated noises alone can carry recognizable melodies.

Evidence

Burns and Viemeister (1976) demonstrated strong support for a temporal code by using noises to evoke a pitch. They measured whether amplitude modulated noises, with modulation rates selected to correspond to musical notes, could be put together to form a melody. These stimuli contained no spectral cues, ensuring that the mechanism for coding pitch was temporally based. They then constructed a number of common melodies using these stimuli and found that all of their listeners were able to identify the melodies 100% of the time, using only temporal information present in the sounds. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1298

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• CANDY: A clean, surprising fact: pure noise, modulated at musical rates, is enough to hear melodies.

Related

• Listeners identify melodies perfectly using only temporal information because amplitude-modulated noise can encode pitch (similarity 0.94)
• The sustained cortical field does not differentiate melody from repeated tonic notes (similarity 0.79)
• Almost every musical sound contains at least two frequency components (similarity 0.78)
• Noise-type sounds have far weaker pitch strength than pure or complex tones. (similarity 0.78)