  Two and a half millennia ago Pythagoras initiated the scientific study of the
pitch of sounds; yet our understanding of the mechanisms of pitch perception
remains incomplete. Physical models of pitch perception try to explain from
elementary principles why certain physical characteristics of the stimulus lead
to particular pitch sensations. There are two broad categories of
pitch-perception models: place or spectral models consider that pitch is mainly
related to the Fourier spectrum of the stimulus, whereas for periodicity or
temporal models its characteristics in the time domain are more important.
Current models from either class are usually computationally intensive,
implementing a series of steps more or less supported by auditory physiology.
However, the brain has to analyse and react in real time to an enormous amount
of information from the ear and other senses. How is all this information
efficiently represented and processed in the nervous system? A proposal of
nonlinear and complex systems research is that dynamical attractors may form
the basis of neural information processing. Because the auditory system is a
complex and highly nonlinear dynamical system it is natural to suppose that
dynamical attractors may carry perceptual and functional meaning. Here we show
that this idea, scarcely developed in current pitch models, can be successfully
applied to pitch perception.
