Singing Pitch Extraction by Voice Vibrato / Tremolo Estimation and Instrument Partial Deletion

This paper proposes a novel and effective approach to extract the pitches of the singing voice from monaural polyphonic songs. The sinusoidal partials of the musical audio signals are first extracted. The Fourier transform is then applied to extract the vibrato/tremolo information of each partial. Some criteria based on this vibrato/tremolo information are employed to discriminate the vocal partials from the music accompaniment partials. Besides, a singing pitch trend estimation algorithm which is able to find the global singing progressing tunnel is also proposed. The singing pitches can then be extracted more robustly via these two processes. Quantitative evaluation shows that the proposed algorithms significantly improve the raw pitch accuracy of our previous approach and are comparable with other state of the art approaches submitted to MIREX.