Pitch Extraction and Fundamental Frequency: History and Current Techniques

Technical Report TR=CS 2003-06 University of Regina Saskatchewan, Canada, 2003.Pitch extraction (also called fundamental frequency estimation) has been a popular topic in many fields of research since the age of computers. Yet in the course of some 50 years of study, current techniques are still not to a desired level of accuracy and robustness. When presented with a single clean pitched signal, most techniques do well, but when the signal is noisy, or when there are multiple pitch streams, many current pitch algorithms still fail to perform well. This report presents a discussion of the history of pitch detection techniques, as well as a survey of the current state of the art in pitch detection technology.