Real Time Pitch Extraction With Real World Constraints

According to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) (1960) pitch is that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds may be ordered on a scale extending from low to high.I Thus pitch is a parameter of sound as perceived by the human auditory system.The task of automatic pitch extraction is to emulate the human perception process using electronic and computer systems.Pitch extraction techniques are used in many applications from aids for the deaf to speech coding, synthesis, recognition and communications; and from pitch~to MIDI conversion to phonetics and linguistics.Each application has a different set of requirements and problems to overcome.However, a sub-group of the applications do have similar requirements imposed on them by virtue of the fact that the human auditory system is the recipient of their output.For many of these applications the input signal is a complex speech or music waveform and the output is required in real time.Drawing up a speci cation for a. pitch extractor in these circumstances is dif cult.