Group delay based melody monopitch extraction from music

In this paper, we propose a modified group delay based method for melodic pitch extraction from heterophonic music. The power spectrum of the music signal is first flattened in order that the system characteristics are annihilated, while the characteristics of the source are emphasized. The modified group delay function of this signal produces peaks at multiples of the pitch period. The first 3 peaks are used to determine the actual pitch period. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated on two datasets ADC-2004, and LabROSA. The performance is comparable to that of other magnitude spectrum based approaches. The algorithms are also applied to heterophonic music, namely Carnatic Music. As ground truth is not available for Carnatic Music, the pitch contours were used to synthesize the music, which was evaluated for correctness by a professional musician.