Proceedings of 2011 International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication, Computing and Networking Technologies (ICSCCN 2011)

Vocal Pitch Detection For Musical Transcription

Mrs. V. Bharathi Asaph Abraham. A Mrs. R. Ramya
Asst. Professor, Dept. Of ECE Student Asst. Professor, Dept. Of ECE
Sri Manakula Vinayagar Sri Manakula Vinayagar Sri Manakula Vinayagar
Engineering College Engineering College Engineering College
bharathime@rediffmail.com yloz.ash@gmail.com mithulramya@rediffmail.com

such as music transcription and score following, music

Abstract—In this paper, an improved method for the detection
of vocal pitch for musical transcription is considered and
detected pitch is used as a technique for the extraction of musical
data from the given audio input. Harmonics present in the voice
signal are eliminated by filtering techniques and the resulting
signal is divided into a number of segments based on the input
sequence given by a metronome input. Pitch of each segment is
calculated and compared with a stored frequency table to assign
the necessary musical note. The assigned musical note is used for
automatic annotation of singing voice in monophonic audio.
Keywords— Pitch Detection, Vocal signals, musical
transcription, Linear predictive coding
I. INTRODUCTION
New hardware and software enable new forms of
interaction with sound. Both composers and listeners can
experiment with new relations to sound objects and music.
The use of symbolic notations in music composition and
production environments has been growing over the past
decades. Meanwhile, several research areas of the music
community are driven towards the extraction of semantic
meaning from a musical stream. However, little has been done
to link the extraction of this semantic information to its
applications in composition and recording.
There are four musically relevant audio descriptors which
are onset times, pitch, beats and notes. This paper deals with
the extraction of pitch of vocal signals and uses it for musical
transcription.
Pitch estimation is one of the highly investigated and
developed areas of signal processing. The problem of pitch
estimation is an area of research during all the evolution of
digital signal processing. Pitch determination has numerous
applications in speech processing. Accurate pitch extraction
has been demonstrated to play a very important role in speech
coding, speech compression, speech synthesis, speech
recognition and speaker identification, as well as in musical
world. A good estimation of pitch period is crucial to improve
the performance of speech analysis and synthesis systems. Till
now these techniques have been used for the transcription of
other musical signals. Detecting the pitch of a human singing
voice is an area where active research is going on currently.
II. PITCH DETECTION ALGORITHMS
Pitch detection methods are essential for the analysis of
harmony in music signals. They are used in different systems,
recognition and classification, melody modifications, time-
stretching and other audio effects. A large number of methods
has been proposed for the estimation of the fundamental
frequency of speech signals, nowadays used in various
applications, from speaker recognition to sound
transformations.
Algorithms for pitch estimation are generally classified into
two main categories: methods estimating periodicities in the
waveform of the signal and methods which look for harmonic
patterns in the spectrum.
These can be generally classified as working in time
domain or frequency domain. Some of the many available
pitch detection algorithms include the short-time average
magnitude difference function (AMDF), short-term
autocorrelation function (ACF), direct time domain
fundamental frequency estimation (DFE), weighted
autocorrelation (WAC), and zero-cross rate with
autocorrelation algorithms. Although many pitch detection
algorithms have been discovered, few of them have been built
in special purpose digital hardware able to work on noisy
environment and real time.
In general, the short-time AMDF and short-term ACF are
often employed in pitch detection. AMDF based methods
exhibit less computational complexity while ACF based
methods perform better in case of noisy speech. The AMDF
based methods are thus widely used in real-time systems
because of its time efficiency. Using the AMDF based method;
however, two types of estimation errors often happen. One is
that the estimated pitch period is multiple of the actual, while
the other is that the actual value is multiple of the estimated.
We refer the first one as double pitch error, and the other one
as half pitch error. The reason for these errors is mainly the
complication of speech waveforms. Besides this, these errors
occur mainly due to the falling trend of the AMDF peaks at
higher lags. For the noisy speech signals, this tendency
increases the occurrence of octave errors in a greater degree.
III. LINEAR PREDICTIVE CODING
Linear predictive coding (LPC) is a tool used for
representing the spectral envelope of a digital signal of speech
in compressed form, using the information of a linear
predictive model. It is also one of the most useful methods for
encoding good quality speech at a low bit rate and it also
provides extremely accurate estimates of speech parameters.

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Proceedings of 2011 International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication, Computing and Networking Technologies (ICSCCN 2011)
LPC analyses the speech signal by estimating the formants,
removing their effects from the speech signal, and estimating
the intensity and frequency of the remaining buzz. The
process of removing the formants is called inverse filtering,
and the remaining signal after the subtraction of the filtered
modelled signal is called the residue. This property of the LPC
algorithm makes it a valuable tool in pitch detection process
of the voiced vocal signal. Speech signals vary with time and
therefore this process is done on short chunks of the speech
signal, which are called frames; generally 30 to 50 frames per
second give intelligible speech with good compression. The
LPC algorithm approximates the vocal signal as a linear
combination of the past samples.
Thus a voiced vocal signal can be represented in
accordance to the LPC algorithm by equation 1 as
............1
where,
X[n]: Present speech sample
X[n-k]: previous speech samples
p: order of the model
ak: prediction coefficient
e[n]: prediction error
For the detection of pitch of vocal signals, the prediction
model that is used is the Autoregressive model. The
autoregressive (AR) model is a type of random process which
is used to model and predict an output of a system based on
the previous outputs.
The auto regressive model can be expressed as in equation
............2
where,
are the parameters of the model
c is a constant (often omitted for simplicity)
is white noise.
P is the order of the model
Thus a first order AR model can be represented in the form
of a mathematical equation as ,
............3
Where,
is a white noise process with zero mean and variance
To increase the accuracy of the prediction of the LPC
algorithm the order of the model is usually high. To determine
the parameters of the model, the Yule-Walker equations are
used and there is a direct correspondence between these
parameters and the covariance function of the process, and
this correspondence can be inverted to determine the
parameters from the autocorrelation function.
IV. PITCH DETECTION USING LPC
Before the application of the LPC algorithm on the voice
signal whose pitch is to be extracted, a window function is
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applied as the voice signal is a time varying random signal
which means that the pitch of the signal will not remain
constant throughout the length of the song or speech.
Therefore the window function is applied to segment the
entire input audio into a number of smaller chunks off sample
lengths ranging from 30-50.
Fig. 1 explains the pitch detection process by using the LPC
method for vocal signals.
FIGURE 1: BLOCK DIAGRAM OF PITCH DETECTOR USING LPC
The window function that are generally used in signal
processing include the Rectangular window, Hann window,
Hamming window, Tukey window, Cosine window, Lanczos
window, Triangular windows, Gaussian windows, Bartlett–
Hann window, Blackman windows, Kaiser windows.
Of these windows, the rectangular window is generally
used for the purpose of pitch estimation as it provides a
constant value inside the interval and a zero outside the
interval. The rectangular window is the best choice for
detecting a sinusoid at low signal-to-noise ratios.
The choosing of the window function depends on a number
of factors of which the attenuation in the stop band plays an
important role.
The LPC algorithm is preferred over the other pitch
detection algorithms for the detection of pitch of vocal signals
because of the reason that the voice signal is made up of
formant frequencies which are the harmonics of the original
pitch of the signal. The LPC algorithm eliminates these
formant frequencies in vocal signal and detects the main
envelope of the signal.
The envelope that is detected is then passed through a peak
detector where the peaks are detected based on a preset
threshold value. The detected peaks are then counted by using
a counter.
The pitch of the signal is calculated by finding the number
of ratio of the peaks to the total time period of the window.
............4
Where,
- Number of peaks that is detected
- Time period of the window.
Fig. 2 shows the varied pitch detected by using different
window functions. It can be seen from Fig 2 that the
rectangular window offers exact segmentation of the audio
signal with minimum overlap and minimum computations
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Proceedings of 2011 International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication, Computing and Networking Technologies (ICSCCN 2011)

which makes the model an optimal one that can be realised in VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
a real time scenario. In this paper we have proposed and implemented a novel
pitch detection algorithm for detecting the pitch of singing
voice. The LPC technique that is discussed here uses spectral
analysis for the detection of pitch after finding the main
envelope of the vocal signal for a given window duration. The
main advantage of using the LPC algorithm for pitch detection
is that it is not affected by the problem of harmonic
frequencies which are the main formants in vocal signals as in
AMDF and ACF techniques, and it eliminates the unwanted
formants and thus helps in accurate pitch detection of vocal
signals which is not possible in other pitch detection
techniques. The technique was further implemented in
LABVIEW and the experimental results of the same show that
the detected pitch of the vocal signals lie in a Frequency band
and can also be used for automatic annotation of music by
comparing each musical note to a given band of frequencies.

FIGURE2: PITCH OUTPUT FOR DIFFERENT WINDOW FUNCTIONS

REFERENCES
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TABLE 1: PITCH OUTPUT ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL.
ASSP-24,NO. 5, OCTOBER 1976
Note Original Frequency Detected Detected
Theoretical Voice musical Note
Value Frequency frequency
C 523.25 486.63 496.36
D 587.33 552.11 550.45
E 659.26 616.19 650.12
F 698.46 672.13 669.18
G 783.99 744.36 753.23
A 880.00 834.12 865.67
B 987.77 902.13 970.54
C 1046.50 989.36 1036.21

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