Real-time Pitched/Unpitched Separation of Monophonic Timbre Components

Described here is a new technique for the real-time separation of a monophonic sound source timbre into its pitched and unpitched components (e.g. violin string vibration vs. bow noise.) This technique differs from preexisting noise extraction and reduction techniques in that it does not rely on a priori knowledge of the signal and does not consider the duration or stability of a component in determining whether that component is pitched, but rather analyzes sinusoidal components based on their harmonic relationship to an estimated fundamental frequency. This has several benefits including independence of time in the determination of un-pitched components and the ability to discern pitched components from unpitched components in situations where the unpitched components may be steady in the time-evolving frequency sense.