Time-pitch representations: Acoustic signal processing and auditory representations

Principles of time-frequency or time-scale analysis have been applied to study the processing of the human auditory system, which is often modeled as a bank of bandpass overlapping nonlinear filters. While a bandpass nonlinear model is an accurate portrayal of the physiological properties of the peripheral auditory system, and aspects of such organization have been shown to persist throughout the central auditory system, the "natural axes" of the human auditory perception appear to be time and pitch, rather than time and frequency or scale. Furthermore, "pitch" appears to have at least two perceptual attributes, chroma and tone height. In this paper, we develop several mathematical structures for time-chroma and time-tone-height representations of acoustic signals and study, in particular, how these structures represent harmonic signals.