Wikipedia
Virtual pitch is a pitch at the missing fundamental of a harmonic complex tone. It corresponds to the phenomenon whereby one's brain extracts tones from everyday signals(including speech) and music, even if parts of the signal are masked by other sounds. Virtual pitch is contrasted to spectral pitch, which is the pitch of a pure tone or spectral component. Virtual pitch is called "virtual" because there is no acoustical correlate at the frequency corresponding to the pitch: even when a virtual pitch corresponds to a physically present fundamental (or first harmonic), as it often does in everyday harmonic complex tones, the exact virtual pitch depends on the exact frequencies of higher harmonics and is almost independent of the exact frequency of the fundamental.
The term was coined by Professor Ernst Terhardt from Technical University of Munich in 1970.
Usage examples of "virtual pitch".
It was down a mile-long gallery of these stimuli that Nell madeunexpected breakaway, looking from Harv's increasingly distantof view like an ant scuttling across a television screen with theand saturation turned all the way up, violently changingfrom time to time as she was menaced by a virtual pitch-daemonat her from the false parallax of a moving z-buffer,like a comet against a bogus firmament of video black Shethat they were fake and in most cases didn't even recognizeproducts they were pitching, but her life had taught herabout dodging.