Analysis of Polyphonic Musical Time Series

Abstract

A general model for pitch tracking of polyphonic musical time series will be introduced. Based on a model of Davy and Godsill (Bayesian harmonic models for musical pitch estimation and analysis, Technical Report 431, Cambridge University Engineering Department, 2002) Davy and Godsill (2002) the different pitches of the musical sound are estimated with MCMC methods simultaneously. Additionally a preprocessing step is designed to improve the estimation of the fundamental frequencies (A comparative study on polyphonic musical time series using MCMC methods. In C. Preisach et al., editors, Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Applications, Springer, Berlin, 2008). The preprocessing step compares real audio data with an alphabet constructed from the McGill Master Samples (Opolko and Wapnick, McGill University Master Samples [Compact disc], McGill University, Montreal, 1987) and consists of tones of different instruments. The tones with minimal Itakura–Saito distortion (Gray et al., Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ASSP-28(4):367–376, 1980) are chosen as first estimates and as starting points for the MCMC algorithms. Furthermore the implementation of the alphabet is an approach for the recognition of the instruments generating the musical time series. Results are presented for mixed monophonic data from McGill and for self recorded polyphonic audio data.