Pitch is one of the fundamental attributes of auditory perception. Melodies are created by sequential changes in pitch, and harmonies are formed by simultaneous combinations of pitch. In speech, pitch conveys prosody in most languages and lexical information in tone languages, such as Mandarin. Despite its importance, and decades of research on the topic, there are still disagreements about some very basic aspects of pitch, such as its representation in the peripheral auditory system. This talk will review recent and not-so-recent work from our lab on the nature of pitch coding, and on its relevance for speech communication in noisy and complex acoustic environments. (Talk given at the Berkeley Ear Club).