hi Carl. One reference to this issue occurs in Richard Parncutt's
important 1988 "Revision of Terhardt's Psychoacoustical Model of the
Root(s) of a musical chord." On p. 70, he discusses Terhtards use of
subharmonics for a chord root model, and on the 'mistuning' of the
natural 7th harmonic, he writes that 'this does not effect the model,
as mistunings by up to half a semitone may still be perceived as
belonging to the tone [citations...]...and variations in tuning may
occur in performance of diatonic music [citations..]without effecting
the musics perceived tonal structure. Such varaitions are esay to
eplain if musical intervals are regarded as no more that pitch
distances (as in Terhards model) rather than as frequency ratios (eg,
as in the theory of Boomsliter and Creel, 1961.)"

I don't know the current status of this debate, but have often seen
it stated in the psychacoust lit. that tonal fusion in a complex tone
works within a range of 'mistuings'...

-Kelly

he writes " --- In harmonic_entropy@yahoogroups.com, Carl Lumma
<carl@...> wrote:
>
> At 12:56 PM 12/29/2007, you wrote:
> >Believe me, a top source. I belive it's based, partly, on the
work of Bloomslitter and Creel.
>
> What is based on Boomlitter & Creel?
>
> >All you have to do is look at the main papers in psychoacoustics
to see that the exact tuning of the interval doesn't matter for
phenom. such as tonal fusion.
>
> I'm not familiar with such papers. Can you cite some examples?
>
> -Carl
>