missing fundamental

British  

noun

1. a tone, not present in the sound received by the ear, whose pitch is that of the difference between the two tones that are sounded

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Example Sentences

“As we have gotten increasingly higher accuracy, the issue has changed — we can now ask if there are cracks in our current standard cosmological model. Is there some new missing fundamental physics?”

From New York Times

Roberts does not oversell mathematics as the explanation for the missing fundamental, but shows how mathematics can be used as a tool to predict the perceived pitch based on the spectrum of pitches produced.

From Scientific American

There is a mathematical explanation for the auditory illusion in my example, sometimes called the missing fundamental: The perceived pitch is the greatest common divisor of the frequencies of the sine waves present.

From Scientific American

This common phrase is, as it happens, known as “Bushnell’s law” – he first uttered it in 1971 while making his preliminary steps into the arcade business with seminal coin-op Computer Space. com ‘Most games are missing fundamental game design’ Forty-five years later, his comparison of mobile and arcade sensibilities will be controversial, but they hold weight.

From The Guardian