Pitch detection algorithm

A pitch detection algorithm (PDA) is an algorithm designed to estimate the pitch or fundamental frequency of a quasiperiodic or oscillating signal, usually a digital recording of speech or a musical note or tone. This can be done in the time domain or the frequency domain or both the two domains.

PDAs are used in various contexts (e.g. phonetics, music information retrieval, speech coding, musical performance systems) and so there may be different demands placed upon the algorithm. There is as yet no single ideal PDA, so a variety of algorithms exist, most falling broadly into the classes given below.

, a PDA typically estimates the period of a quasiperiodic signal, then inverts that value to give the frequency.

One simple approach would be to measure the distance between zero crossing points of the signal (i.e. the zero-crossing rate). However, this does not work well with complicated waveforms which are composed of multiple sine waves with differing periods or noisy data. Nevertheless, there are cases in which zero-crossing can be a useful measure, e.g. in some speech applications where a single source is assumed. The algorithm's simplicity makes it "cheap" to implement.

More sophisticated approaches compare segments of the signal with other segments offset by a trial period to find a match. AMDF (average magnitude difference function), ASMDF (Average Squared Mean Difference Function), and other similar algorithms work this way. These algorithms can give quite accurate results for highly periodic signals. However, they have false detection problems (often "octave errors"), can sometimes cope badly with noisy signals (depending on the implementation), and - in their basic implementations - do not deal well with polyphonic sounds (which involve multiple musical notes of different pitches).

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