Melodic pitch extraction from music signals using modified group delay functions

In this paper, we propose a method to extract the melody pitch in a polyphonic environment, using phase information of the signal. Group delay functions are used for melody extraction. The group delay function computed directly from the speech signal has been widely used to extract source and system parameters. The main objective of this study is to address melodic pitch extraction using features based on the Fourier Transform phase of a signal rather than the conventional Fourier Transform magnitude. As the phase is difficult to process, the modified group delay function is processed to extract pitch. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on ADC-2004 dataset, LabROSA training set and MIR-1K dataset. The results of the proposed method are comparable to that of existing methods based on the Fourier transform magnitude spectrum. © 2013 IEEE.