Pitch from gated noise vanishes when gaps shrink below temporal resolution

Evidence

Up to a ratio of impulse duration and gap duration of 0.1, the maximum pitch strength of amplitude-modulated broad-band noise appears. With increasing impulse duration, and consequently decreasing gap duration, the pitch strength decreases. For a ratio larger than about 3, pitch strength drops to zero. In this case, long broad-band noise bursts are followed by extremely short temporal gaps which are no longer resolved by the hearing system (see Sect. 4.4). Hence, these gated broad-band noises sound like continuous broad-band noise 0. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 859

Categorization

• DEFINE: Case where temporal resolution failure explains pitch disappearance — pitch requires resolvable gaps between bursts.