It has been suggested that the dependence of pitch salience on duration follows a sort of "acoustic uncertainty principles,"
Δf Δt = K,
where Δf is the uncertainty in frequency and Δt is the duration of a tone burst. K, which can be as short as 0.1 (Majernik and Kaluzny, 1979), appears to depend upon intensity and amplitude envelope (Ronken, 1971). The actual pitch appears to have little or no dependence upon duration (Doughty and Garner, 1948; Rossing and Houtsma, 1986).
In this demonstration, we present tones of 300, 1000, and 3000 Hz in bursts of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 periods. How many periods are necessary to establish a sense of pitch?
References
J.M.Doughty and W.M.Garner (1948), "Pitch characteristics of short tones II: pitch as a function of duration," J. Exp. Psych. 38, 478-94.
V.Majernik and J.Kaluzny (1979), "On the auditory uncertainty relations," Acustica 43, 132-46.
D.A.Ronken (1971), "Some effects of bandwidth-duration constraints on frequency discrimination," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 49 1232-42.
T.D.Rossing and A.J.M.Houtsma (1986), "Effects of signal envelope on the pitch of short sinusoidal tones," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 1926-33.
F.Savart (1830), "Uber die Ursachen der Tonhohe," Ann. Phys. Chem. 51, 555.
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