Physiological correlates of the perceptual pitch shift for sounds with similar waveform autocorrelation

A perceptual experiment shows that random click trains with a uniform interclick distribution can be reliably pitch-matched to pseudo-periodic click trains. The pitch matches cannot be explained on the basis of mean rate, power spectrum, or autocorrelation of the waveform. The matches are qualitatively, but not quantitatively, consistent with the most common interspike interval present in responses of single units from the ventral cochlear nucleus of anaesthetised guinea pigs. The physiological recordings also demonstrate that at the level of the cochlear nucleus, similar cues are found in either first-order or all-order interspike interval statistics.