Harmonic decomposition of audio signals with matching pursuit

We introduce a dictionary of elementary waveforms, called harmonic atoms, that extends the Gabor dictionary and fits well the natural harmonic structures of audio signals. By modifying the “standard” matching pursuit, we define a new pursuit along with a fast algorithm, namely the Fast Harmonic Matching Pursuit, to approximate N-dimensional audio signals with a linear combination of M harmonic atoms. Our algorithm has a computational complexity of O(MKN), where K is the number of partials in a given harmonic atom. The decomposition method is demonstrated on musical recordings, and we describe a simple note detection algorithm that shows how one could use a harmonic matching pursuit to detect notes even in difficult situations, e.g., very different note durations, lots of reverberation, and overlapping notes. Keywords— matching pursuit, Gabor atom, harmonic structure, fundamental frequency extraction, time-frequency analysis, audio signals, note detection.