F0 Estimation of Melody and Bass Lines in Real-world Musical Audio Signals

This paper describes a method for estimating the fundamental frequency (F0) of melody and bass lines in monaural audio signals containing sounds of various instruments. Most previous methods premised mixtures of a few sounds and had great difficulty dealing with audio signals sampled from compact discs. Our method does not rely on the unreliable F0’s component and obtains the most predominant F0 supported by harmonics within an intentionally limited frequency range. It estimates relative dominance of every possible F0 by using the ExpectationMaximization algorithm and considers F0’s temporal continuity by introducing a multi-agent model. Experimental results show that our real-time system can detect the melody and bass lines in real-world audio signals.