Using computational physiological models of the auditory nerve to understand pitch perception for complex sounds.

From periodic sounds in the natural world, the auditory system extracts pitch, a perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0) which is crucial for perception of speech and music. Many models of pitch perception rely heavily on the rate-place code, the pattern of average firing rates in neural populations tuned to specific frequencies. Using a physiological model of peripheral auditory processing at the level of the auditory nerve, we generated metamers – physically distinct stimuli with identical model outputs – of the rate-place code for stimuli containing one or multiple simultaneous pitches, across a range of frequencies and F0s. We hope that human behavioral and modeled neural responses to these auditory nerve rate metamers will reveal the extent to which different sources of pitch-related information can be used for pitch perception.

This work was presented at ARO 2024 as a poster: ARO_2024_poster_GravesGuestMehta (2)