Relative contribution of temporal and spectral cues to melodic contour identification

The aim of this study was to investigate the relative contribution of temporal and spectral cues to melodic contour identification (MCI). Ten normal-hearing subjects participated in this study. Acoustic stimuli from four instruments and synthetic complex tone were utilized. A noise-excited vocoder was used to extract the temporal and spectral information from the stimuli. Experimental results showed that the spectral cue was more important to MCI than the temporal cue. Eight frequency bands were sufficient to achieve relatively good MCI performance. Temporal resolution showed no significant effect on the MCI performance. Confusion matrix was used to analysis the data. It was indicated that detecting pitch difference was easier than identifying pitch direction with restricted spectral information.