The residue pitch of an amplitude‐modulated carrier wave with fixed carrier frequencydecreasesfor small increases modulation frequency. This surprising experimental finding can be accounted for by considering the effect of phase modulation, synchronous and antiphasic with the amplitude modulation, on the temporal fine structure of the signal or its spectrum. Some conversion of amplitude modulation into phase modulation is known to occur in the mechanical response of the basilar membrane. However, for phase modulation to account fully for the pitch matches reported in the literature, additional amplitude‐to phase conversion must occur either in the mechanical‐to‐neural transduction or in the neural processing.