Musically trained listeners can judge pitch intervals even above the phase-locking limit

Evidence

There exist, however, some observations that cast doubt on the generally accepted assumption that phase locking is necessary for musical pitch. For example, while most subjects in Ward’s ( 1954 ) study were unable to make octave judgements when the reference frequency, f1, was above 2700 Hz, for two of his subjects the variability in octave judgements was essentially the same for f1 = 5 kHz (with the octave match at ~ 10 kHz) as for lower frequencies. However, octave judgements were more difficult and subjects took a greater time when f1 was 5 kHz. Ward suggested that experience might play a role, as these two subjects were the only ones with experience in judging the pitch of pure tones. … Similarly, Burns and Feth ( 1983 ) asked musically trained subjects to adjust various musical intervals for reference frequencies of 1 kHz and 10 kHz. Even for the high frequency, all three subjects could do the task. For the 10-kHz reference, the standard deviations, SDs, averaged across all musical intervals, were about 3.5–5.5 times larger than for the 1-kHz reference. This increase was less than that observed for unison adjustments, which were taken as an estimate of the difference limen for frequency, DLF. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5396

There exist, however, some observations that cast doubt on the generally accepted assumption that phase locking is necessary for musical pitch. For example, while most subjects in Ward’s ( 1954 ) study were unable to make octave judgements when the reference frequency, f1, was above 2700 Hz, for two of his subjects the variability in octave judgements was essentially the same for f1 = 5 kHz (with the octave match at ~ 10 kHz) as for lower frequencies. However, octave judgements were more difficult and subjects took a greater time when f1 was 5 kHz. Ward suggested that experience might play a role, as these two subjects were the only ones with experience in judging the pitch of pure tones. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5398

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether musical training can override or compensate for the loss of phase-locking timing cues at high frequencies is worth chasing in further reading.
• SHARE: For whoever works on pitch mechanisms — expert musicians retain interval judgement accuracy even at 10 kHz, where phase locking is thought gone.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s understanding of temporal vs place coding theories of pitch across 2-14 kHz frequency ranges.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5396; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5398