# Pitch (pitchProc.m)¶

Following [Slaney1990], [Meddis2001], [Meddis1997], the sub-band periodicity analysis obtained by the ACF can be integrated across frequency by giving equal weight to each frequency channel. The resulting SACF reflects the strength of periodicity as a function of the lag period for a given time frame, as illustrated in Fig. 25. Based on the SACF representation, the most salient peak within the plausible pitch frequency range p_pitchRangeHz is detected for each frame in order to obtain an estimation of the fundamental frequency. In addition to the peak position, the corresponding amplitude of the SACF is used to reflect the confidence of the underlying pitch estimation. More specifically, if the SACF magnitude drops below a pre-defined percentage p_confThresPerc of its global maximum, the corresponding pitch estimate is considered unreliable and set to zero. The estimated pitch contour is smoothed across time frames by a median filter of order p_orderMedFilt, which aims at reducing the amount of octave errors. A list of all parameters is presented in Table 29. In the context of pitch estimation, it will be useful to experiment with the settings related to the non-linear pre-processing of the ACF, as described in Auto-correlation (autocorrelationProc.m).

Table 29 List of parameters related to 'pitch'.
Parameter Default Description
p_pitchRangeHz [80 400] Plausible pitch frequency range in Hz
p_confThresPerc 0.7 Confidence threshold related to the SACF magnitude
p_orderMedFilt 3 Order of the median filter

The task of pitch estimation is demonstrated by the script DEMO_Pitch and the corresponding SACF plots are presented in Fig. 31. The pitch is estimated for an anechoic speech signal (top left panel). The corresponding is presented in the top right panel, where each black cross represents the most salient lag period per time frame. The plausible pitch range is indicated by the two white dashed lines. The confidence measure of each individual pitch estimates is shown in the bottom left panel, which is used to set the estimated pitch to zero if the magnitude of the SACF is below the threshold. The final pitch contour is post-processed with a median filter and shown in the bottom right panel. Unvoiced frames, where no pitch frequency was detected, are indicated by NaN‘s.

 [Meddis1997] Meddis, R. and O’Mard, L. (1997), “A unitary model of pitch perception,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102(3), pp. 1811–1820.
 [Meddis2001] Meddis, R., O’Mard, L. P., and Lopez-Poveda, E. A. (2001), “A computational algorithm for computing nonlinear auditory frequency selectivity,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109(6), pp. 2852–2861.
 [Slaney1990] Slaney, M. and Lyon, R. F. (1990), “A perceptual pitch detector,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 357–360.