Leonardus Franciscus Willems

Pitch in speech: A hearing theory approach

The current hearing theory views on perception of pitch in complex sounds converge towards the interpretation that pitch is the result of a psychological pattern recognition process. Pitch is determined by the fundamental of the harmonic sound which spectrum optimally matches that of the complex sound. Goldstein [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 54, 1496–1516 (1973)] proposed an objective procedure for finding the best fit. We have adapted and extended his procedure in a pitch meter which measures pitch in speech. The most important deviation from Goldsteins procedure is that in our implementation not all components of the complex sound have to be classified as harmonics. A simple criterion, based on the number of harmonics that is classified as a candidate pitch, determines which candidate pitch is selected. Performance of this psychoacoustically based pitch meter compares favorably with that of known algorithms.