Voicing Determination of Speech with an Extension Toward Music Signals

This chapter reviews selected methods for pitch determination of speech and music signals. As both these signals are time variant we first define what is subsumed under the term pitch. Then we subdivide pitch determination algorithms (PDAs) into short-term analysis algorithms, which apply some spectral transform and derive pitch from a frequency or lag domain representation, and time-domain algorithms, which analyze the signal directly and apply structural analysis or determine individual periods from the first partial or compute the instant of glottal closure in speech. In the 1970s, when many of these algorithms were developed, the main application in speech technology was the vocoder, whereas nowadays prosody recognition in speech understanding systems and high-accuracy pitch period determination for speech synthesis corpora are emphasized. In musical acoustics, pitch determination is applied in melody recognition or automatic musical transcription, where we also have the problem that several pitches can exist simultaneously.