Psychoacoustic tonality measures tone-character, distinct from musical tonality terms

Evidence

Tonality (or tonalness) is similar to the voicing character of speech: tonality is low with noisy sounds and high with sounds containing prominent frequency components, or tones. The tonality of a sound also increases with one or many high-amplitude and narrowband components, where the listener resolves either the fundamental frequency or a tonal component of the sound. Tonality is also related to pitch salience. When pitch salience is high, such as with pure tones or with narrowband noises, the tonality is high as well. However, with some signals, such as bell sounds, pitch is ambiguous, producing low pitch salience but yet high tonality. Note that tonality in psychoacoustics is a quantity which reflects how much the sound contains the characteristics of a tone. It is not to be confused with the terms from music, tonality, tonal, atonal, and microtonal, which are descriptors of musical scales and styles of musical composition. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1243

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the crucial disambiguation between psychoacoustic ‘tonality’ (quantity of tone-likeness) and the unrelated musical terms tonal/atonal/microtonal — a persistent terminological confusion worth nailing down.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier foundational work on pitch salience, amplitude spectra, and noise versus tonal components developed across the previous hearing chapters.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1243