Pitch estimation for non-stationary speech

Recently, parametric methods have proven capable of overcoming the problems of correlation-based methods for pitch estimation. However, the argument against such methods is that the underlying model is wrong, particularly for non-stationary signals, like speech. To investigate whether this is true, we propose a new, non-stationary harmonic chirp model for pitch estimation, and we derive an estimator for determining its parameters. Experimental results show that the new model and the estimator lead to both improved pitch estimates and reconstruction quality, but also that the improvements in pitch are usually quite small, typically in the order of a few Hertz.