Natural Regularity of Correlated Acoustic Frequency and Intensity in Music and Speech: Auditory Scene Analysis Mechanisms Account for Integrality of Pitch and Loudness

Dynamic changes in acoustic intensity can produce perceptual changes in pitch as large as half an octave. Here we investigate the functional roots behind these large distortions. We propose a natural acoustic regularity in which sound sources that change in fundamental frequency (f0) typically congruently change in intensity, and vice versa. It is therefore adaptive for the auditory system to capitalize on this statistical regularity by...