No single standard method measures perceived tonality accurately

Evidence

There is no really clear method to measure tonality, although there are several starting points from which it can be quantified. Some methods are described below. A simple measure for tonality is the tone-to-noise ratio, T/N, which has also been standardized in ISO-7779 (2010). It measures the level of a tone compared to the level of the surrounding frequency band. Unfortunately, if there are multiple tones present in a critical band, the T/N method does not match the perceived tonality. The prominence ratio, PR (Bienvenue and Nobile, 1991) is a better approach in such cases; here, the power of the critical band containing the prominent tone is compared to the mean power in adjacent critical bands. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1244

Categorization

• QUESTION: The failure of T/N with multiple tones in one critical band suggests a gap worth investigating — what perceptual model would handle multi-tone critical bands correctly?