Pitch perception requires a tone lasting at least two signal periods

Evidence

The formation of the percept of pitch and improving its precision requires a sample of a signal with non-zero length. In theory, at least two periods of a periodic signal are necessary before the pitch percept can be formed. The minimum length of a tone burst after which a pitch is perceived is shown in Figure 10.3. The dashed line shows the length of two periods of sine signals. The shortest time window required for pitch perception is seen to be between 400 Hz and 6 kHz, where the length is less than 20 ms. The performance of human hearing in pitch perception is remarkable at low frequencies; the required length for a tone burst is only slightly longer than two periods. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1088

The best accuracy in pitch perception is achieved 100–200 ms after the onset of the sound. The normalized JND of pitch as a function of 2-kHz tone length is plotted in Figure 10.4. It can be seen that the JND decreases only slightly when increasing the duration to over 100 ms, and the JND is practically constant after 200 ms. The variation in the JND with duration differs somewhat across frequencies (Moore, 1973). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1090

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how acoustic signals carry information — the minimum integration window for pitch is the temporal resolution limit of auditory feature extraction. — connects to: Brief tone durations severely impair frequency discrimination — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 3313; The central debate in pitch perception is whether humans are essentially walking Fourier analyzers; Pitch shift from uniform frequency change depends on overtone structure (+4 more)
• SHARE: Relevant to practitioners working with very short test stimuli or fast musical passages where pitch discrimination degrades.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1088; Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1090

Broader Connections

• Clear pitch perception depends on periodic repetition of the pressure wave #expands (0.75) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 774