Interactive Fundamental Frequency Estimation with Applications to Ethnomusicological Research

The analysis of recorded audio sources has become increasingly important in ethnomusicological research. Such audio material may contain important cues on performance practice, information that is often lost in manually generated symbolic music transcriptions. As an application scenario, we consider in this paper a musically relevant audio collection that consists of three-voice polyphonic Georgian chants. As one main contribution, we introduce an interactive graphical user interface that provides various visual and acoustic control mechanisms for estimating fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories from complex sound mixtures. We then apply this interface for determining F0 trajectories of sung pitches from the Georgian chant recordings and indicate how such F0 annotations can be used as basis for addressing important questions in Georgian music research.