Pitch as a Medium: A New Approach to Psychophysical Scaling

Abstract

Certain psychophysical continua have a primarily morphophoric function: they are the media in which patterns occur. The appropriate scale for any such medium is one that reflects the invariances preserved in transposition behavior. The results of two experiments designed to scale pitch by transposition methods lead to the conclusion that the musical scale, not the mel scale, describes the morphophoric function of pitch. However, an abrupt breaking point is evident at about 5,000 Hz, above which transposition behavior is erratic.