F0 and Pitch

[Georgia M]

Looking back at the sound properties and the fundamental frequency (F0), I am trying to make clear the distinction (or not) between F0 and pitch.

Q1: Is there any official measurement unit for pitch (as e.g. is Hz for the F0)? I was wondering in what way the term is distinguished from F0.

Q2: I understand that pitch relates more to our perception of the sound. Is our perception of pitch solely dependent on the F0 of a particular syllable? Or may it differ from utterance to utterance, depending on the previous and next syllables?

Q3: Accordingly, may the F0 of a particular sound differ from utterance to utterance?

Q4: Finally, since the formants determine the quality of a sound, is the F0 completely irrelevant to its quality? I am confused..

[question edited by Simon to break it down into sections]

[Simon]

A1: Pitch is often described on a musical scale. This is a relative scale in which 1 octave corresponds to a doubling in fundamental frequency, and an octave is divided into 12 semitones. This musical scale is effectively log F0. It is therefore common to use log F0 instead of actual F0 when modelling it (e.g., for speech synthesis). Another unit that is widely used to describe frequencies on a perceptual scale is the Mel scale. For more about this, see Automatic Speech Recognition.

A2: Pitch is the perceptual consequence of F0. Pitch is qualitative (i.e., we need human listeners to describe their perceptions) and F0 is quantitative (i.e., we can measure it objectively from a signal). In speech, they are directly related and for our purposes it is fine to state that our perception of pitch does depend only on F0.

A3: F0 mainly depends on suprasegmental properties of an utterance and not the individual phones in it. Any vowel can be spoken at any F0 (within reason) and still be perceived as that same vowel.

A4: Correct: the quality of a vowel is determined by its formant frequencies and not its F0. See A3 above.

[Georgia M]

Thank you for these clarifications. Now I can clearly make the distinction.

[Author]

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