What is the best way to measure the “range” of fundamental frequency?
There are basically three ways to measure the breadth of a distribution: the standard deviation, the inter quartile range, and the total range. Distributions of fundamental frequency have some odd characteristics, some of which are listed in the answer to the last question. The fact that the distribution often has a large number of outliers means that the use of the standard deviation is not satisfactory: it would give values which are much broader than the truth. Similarly, the total range is only set by two values from a distribution containing possibly thousands of values: the very highest and the very lowest. Thus the total range is also unsatisfactory. Thus measures based on percentiles, like the inter quartile range seem to be our best bet.
