A Predominant-F0 Estimation Method for Polyphonic Musical Audio Signals

In this paper I introduce a method, called PreFEst, for estimating the fundamental frequency (F0) of simultaneous sounds in monaural polyphonic audio signals. Most previous F0-estimation methods have had difficulty dealing with such complex audio signals because these methods were designed to deal with mixtures of only a few sounds. Without assuming the number of sound sources, PreFEst can estimate the relative dominance of every possible harmonic structure in the input mixture. It treats the mixture as if it contains all possible harmonic structures with different weights, and estimates their weights by MAP estimation. PreFEst can obtain the melody and bass lines by regarding the most predominant F0 in middleand highfrequency regions as the melody line and the one in a lowfrequency region as the bass line. Experimental results with compact-disc recordings showed that a real-time system implementing this method was able to detect melody and bass lines about 80% of the time these existed.