Hartmann, W.M. (1988). Pitch perception and the segregation and integration of auditory entities. In: Auditory Function (Edelmann, G.M., Hall, W.E., Cowan, W.M., eds.), Wiley, New York, 623-645

Auditory entities are mental images of individual sound sources constructed by the human auditory system from an acoustic signal created by one or more physical sources. An entity is characterized primarily by its pitch. This chapter reviews the conditions known from psychoacoustic experiments to promote the segregation and integration of entities, including the effects of onset time asychrony, harmonic or inharmonic components, modulation, spectral envelope, tone duration, sound pressure level, spatial origin, context, musical training, and selective attention. We argue that the segregation and integration of entities is properly an aspect of complex tone pitch perception, and review two theories of pitch perception. In one of these, the residue theory, pitch perception is mediated by spectral components of the signal that are not resolved by the auditory system. In the other theory the sensation of pitch is derived from the resolution of a pattern matching operation on spectral components. Models of segregation and integration based upon these two theories make different predictions for the results of psychoacoustic experiments, in particular for the mistuned harmonic experiment, which probes the segregation process. Some results of this experiment, which demonstrate dependences on signal level, tone duration, and component phase cannot be understood within the context of a pitch model that operates on spectrally resolved components. In principle, however, a residue theory (in an altered form) can account for these observed dependences.