Simultaneous cochlear neuron firing across frequencies produces buzzy timbre

Evidence

For an example, signals with equal amplitude spectra but different phase spectra, which have different timbres in headphone listening, can be visualized using the auditory model as shown in Figure 11.11. The signal in the top-left corner is a sawtooth signal with f0 = 100 Hz, and the firing rate is shown below as a spectrogram. The excitation pattern shows vertical stripes, which means that the neurons of the cochlea at all frequencies fire simultaneously, leading to a very buzzy character of sound. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1270