Two different experiments were carried out to examine the perception of short vibrated tones, using synthetic stimuli. A preliminary experiment on long tones showed results identical to those obtained by Shonle and Horan [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 246–252 (1980)]. The first experiment used a method of adjustment to find the pitch of the vibrated tones, according to their durations (or equivalently, to the number of vibrato cycles). Durations from 80 ms (half-cycle for a vibrato rate of about 6 Hz) to 320 ms (two cycles) where studied. The results indicate that an averaging of F0 excursion is performed, and that perception may be ambiguous above a threshold of duration, called herein “threshold of fusion.” The second experiment used a constant method to estimate the threshold of fusion, defined as the fractional number of cycles where a stimulus is integrated into one tone. Above this threshold, a glissando or two consecutive tones are perceived. The threshold was estimated to be at about the second third of a vibrato cycle beginning at zero phase. It was noticeable that in the first experiment, the subjects were still able to assign a unique pitch to the stimuli above the threshold when the tone is long enough. A concluding discussion points out how these psychoacoustic results may contribute to our understanding of pitch perception for vibrato tones in actual musical performance and explain some aesthetic values governing the production of vibrato by singers.
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