Bell Labs pursued only hearing questions relevant to telephone engineering.

Evidence

Their work was innovative, inventive, and impactful. Their investigations have proven to be foundational on the topics of threshold, loudness, and masking. Note in particular, however, that the investigations at that time did not involve other auditory percepts, such as pitch and spatial hearing. Such experiments were not as relevant to the development of the telephone, where engineers were evaluating the limits of hearing to establish the constraints necessary for telephone receivers and associated equipment. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 85

Categorization

• QUESTION: Implies pitch and spatial hearing research lagged because of commercial priorities - when and why did these fields later develop?