Adaptive harmonic spectral decomposition for multiple pitch estimation

Multiple pitch estimation consists of estimating the fundamental frequencies and saliences of pitched sounds over short time frames of an audio signal. This task forms the basis of several applications in the particular context of musical audio. One approach is to decompose the short-term magnitude spectrum of the signal into a sum of basis spectra representing individual pitches scaled by time-varying amplitudes, using algorithms such as nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). Prior training of the basis spectra is often infeasible due to the wide range of possible musical instruments. Appropriate spectra must then be adaptively estimated from the data, which may result in limited performance due to overfitting issues. In this paper, we model each basis spectrum as a weighted sum of narrowband spectra representing a few adjacent harmonic partials, thus enforcing harmonicity and spectral smoothness while adapting the spectral envelope to each instrument. We derive a NMF-like algorithm to estimate the model parameters and evaluate it on a database of piano recordings, considering several choices for the narrowband spectra. The proposed algorithm performs similarly to supervised NMF using pre-trained piano spectra but improves pitch estimation performance by 6% to 10% compared to alternative unsupervised NMF algorithms.