Traditional Machine Learning for Pitch Detection

Pitch detection is a fundamental problem in speech processing as F0 is used in a large number of applications. Recent papers have proposed deep learning for robust pitch tracking. In this letter, we consider voicing detection as a classification problem and F0 contour estimation as a regression problem. For both tasks, acoustic features from multiple domains and traditional machine learning methods are used. The discrimination power of existing and proposed features is assessed through mutual information. Multiple supervised and unsupervised approaches are compared. A significant relative reduction of voicing errors over the best baseline is obtained—20% with the best clustering method (K-means) and 45% with a multi-layer perceptron. For F0 contour estimation, the benefits of regression techniques are limited though. We investigate whether those objective gains translate in a parametric synthesis task. Clear perceptual preferences are observed for the proposed approach over two widely used baselines (robust algorithm for pitch tracking (RAPT) and distributed inline-filter operation (DIO)).