Hearing "tones" in random noise stimuli

Back in 1960 at the University of Rochester, I performed a
psychoacoustic
experiment asking subjects to
match the pitch of a sine wave with the perceived pitch of 2-pole
bandpass limited white noise at various center frequencies and Q's. For
the general population, the standard deviation of pitch estimation was
very nearly the 1 dB bandwidth of the filter. However, for subjects who
deemed themselves musicians, the statistical error was much less (maybe
1/3 of the general population). The overall conclusion was that the
ear/brain does detect the spectral peak of even fairly broad band noise
(I think I used a 3-dB bandwidth of one octave for my broadest
stimulus). This would seem to support Dave Keenan's theory for hearing
a "pitch" of delayed/summed white noise, with multiple spectral peaks at
a uniform frequency spacing implying a fundamental at the reciprocal
delay period.

Fred Reinagel