A reassigned based singing voice pitch contour extraction method

Abstract

Although there are many systems concerned with melody extraction from polyphonic music, there are certain limitations stemming from the spectral processing that are yet to be overpassed. In this paper, we propose a novel method to create sets of melodic pitch contours which are shown to contain harmonic information critical for a melody extraction system. The proposed approach exploits interesting characteristics of the reassigned spectrogram and computes a new representation which comprises a set of points in the time-frequency domain, weighted according to their dominance, in terms of harmonic content. The experimental results show that the proposed method is a valid approach to the detection of time-frequency points that are related to the melodic content of music signals. Moreover, the quality of the acquired melodic pitch contours is proved through a comparison with those extracted by a state-of-the-art melody extraction system.