The cochlear nucleus is the first stage of information processing in the mammalian auditory system. It contains a variety of neurone types that extract specific features from sounds. Physiological experiments have shown that 'onset units' in the guinea-pig cochlear nucleus extract the pitch period both from vowel sounds and from harmonic complexes such as the missing fundamental complexes used in psychophysical experiments. A model simulating the activity in these cells has been developed. The model is tested with synthetic vowel sounds as well as missing fundamental stimuli and predicts the pitches heard accurately. The model is used to extract the pitch from natural speech sounds. The pitch estimate is compared with the fundamental frequency recorded with a laryngograph for the signal alone and with additive noise. The model gives a precise pitch estimate up to 0dB signal to noise ratio.

Keywords: Auditory Model, cochlear nerve, cochlear nucleus, pitch perception, pitch extraction