Pitch contour tracking in music using Harmonic Locked Loops

Abstract

We present a novel time-domain pitch contour tracking algorithm based on Harmonic Locked Loops, which differs from existing method in terms of its approach, resolution, timbre information and speed. In addition to estimating pitch contours, the proposed method computes the amplitude of each harmonic over time, expanding the potential set of features that can be used for higher level tasks such as melody extraction. The method is tested against ground truth melody pitch annotations from publicly available datasets, and we show that contour recall is improved compared with a state of the art approach.