Melodic Contour Extraction for Indian Classical Vocal Music

The problem of pitch tracking of the singing voice in the presence of Indian percussive interference, specifically the tabla, is considered. To overcome the problems due to this particular type of interference, a pitch tracker is used that applies dynamic programming (DP) based smoothing on pitch estimates obtained from a spectral-domain pitch detection algorithm (PDA) that uses harmonic matching. Experiments on real and simulated signals show the superiority of the spectral domain PDA over a correlation domain PDA in terms of pitch detection accuracy and suitability of the PDA output for post-processing. A new smoothing cost function is proposed and evaluated. The paper formulates general rules guiding the choice of cost functions participating in the DP based post-processing for this particular problem.