Event:

Pitch is a vital element of auditory perception: In music, sequences of pitch define melody, and combinations of pitch define harmony; in speech, pitch contours provide important prosodic information and, in tone languages, lexical information. Pitch differences between voices also provide us with a way to solve the "cocktail party problem" and allow us to attend to one voice while ignoring others. The question of how pitch is coded in the peripheral auditory system has gained some urgency with the success of cochlear implants as a treatment for deafness: although many cochlear-implant recipients enjoy good speech perception, their perception of pitch is uniformly poor, as is their ability to hear out speech in complex acoustic environments. A classic, and unsolved, question is whether pitch is encoded primarily by the place of excitation within the cochlea, by the stimulus-driven timing of spikes in the auditory nerve, or by a combination of the two. Another long-standing question involves the mechanisms by which some pitch combinations are judged consonant and others dissonant. This talk will describe how studies aimed at addressing these classic questions have resulted in some surprising answers.