Harmonically informed multi-pitch tracking

This paper presents a novel system for multi-pitch tracking, i.e. estimate the pitch trajectory of each monophonic source in a mixture of harmonic sounds. The system consists of two stages: multi-pitch estimation and pitch trajectory formation. In the first stage, we propose a new approach based on modeling spectral peaks and non-peak regions to estimate pitches and polyphony in each single frame. In the second stage, we view the pitch trajectory formation problem as a constrained clustering problem of pitch estimates in all the frames. Constraints are imposed on some pairs of pitch estimates, according to time and frequency proximity. In clustering, harmonic structure is employed as the feature. The proposed system is tested on 10 recorded four-part J. S. Bach chorales. Both multi-pitch estimation and tracking results are very promising. In addition, for multi-pitch estimation, the proposed system is shown to outperform a state-of-the-art multi-pitch estimation approach.