CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation
This addresses pitch estimation for audio processing applications like speech and music, but it is incremental as it builds on existing data-driven approaches.
The authors tackled pitch tracking in audio by proposing CREPE, a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on waveforms, achieving state-of-the-art results with performance equal to or better than the pYIN algorithm.
The task of estimating the fundamental frequency of a monophonic sound recording, also known as pitch tracking, is fundamental to audio processing with multiple applications in speech processing and music information retrieval. To date, the best performing techniques, such as the pYIN algorithm, are based on a combination of DSP pipelines and heuristics. While such techniques perform very well on average, there remain many cases in which they fail to correctly estimate the pitch. In this paper, we propose a data-driven pitch tracking algorithm, CREPE, which is based on a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the time-domain waveform. We show that the proposed model produces state-of-the-art results, performing equally or better than pYIN. Furthermore, we evaluate the model's generalizability in terms of noise robustness. A pre-trained version of CREPE is made freely available as an open-source Python module for easy application.