ABSTRACT
One of the main reasons for anatomical and physiological studies of sensory systems is the desire to understand the biological mechanisms underlying human sensations and perceptions. In hearing, pitch and loudness may be considered as the key subjective attributes of sound. It is not surprising, therefore, that a voluminous literature has been devoted to these sensations, and the curiosity about them may be traced to antiquity. This appears to be particularly true for the pitch, which is a unique subjective attribute of sound. It is not the intent of this chapter to trace the history of the concepts of pitch or loudness, of the various attempts at understanding the physical parameters controlling them or the physiological mechanisms underlying them. Attempts at determining their physiological codes in the modern sense seem to have begun in the 19th century-in particular through Helmholtz (1877), who proposed a physiological code for the pitch and studied extensively various subjective attributes of sound.
