Direct estimation of musical pitch contour from audio data

The increasing amount of music being stored in digital formats calls for increasingly more creative methods for music information retrieval. One subset of music retrieval methods relies on storing a melody in a pitch contour representation. Most often, this contour information is generated either from symbolic format (MIDI) or from raw audio after a pitch transcription step. We propose a method of extracting pitch contour information from musical audio without an intermediate transcription step by combining a musically-tuned constant Q transform with crosscorrelation. When tested on a database of 520 monophonic music recordings, our method generates pitch contours from raw audio data with up to 98% accuracy.