Higher order waveform symmetry measure and its application to periodicity detectors for speech and singing with fine temporal resolution

Another simple and high-speed F0 extractor with high temporal resolution based on our previous proposal has been developed by adding a higher-order symmetry measure. This extension made the proposed method significantly more robust than the previous one. The proposed method is a detector of the lowest prominent sinusoidal component. It can use several F0 refinement procedures when the signal is the sum of harmonic sinusoidal components. The refinement procedure presented here is based on a stable representation of instantaneous frequency of periodic signals. The whole procedure implemented by Matlab runs faster than realtime on usual PCs for 44,100 Hz sampled sounds. Application of the proposed algorithm revealed that rapid temporal modulations in both F0 trajectory and spectral envelope exist typically in expressive voices such as those those used in lively singing performance.