Frequency estimation of musical signals using STFT and multitapers

This paper presents a detailed analysis and comparison of the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and Thomson´s multitaper method for frequency estimation of musical signals from a classical guitar. We show that more accurate frequency estimates can be obtained by taking into account the frequencies in a small neighbourhood around the identified frequency peaks. We also demonstrate that the multitaper method yields better frequency estimates than those from the STFT while the extra computation time required is almost negligible.