Pitch Estimation of Notes in Indian Classical Music

Music consists of various tones having a definite pitch. Thus the study of music from a signal processing perspective involves extraction and processing of the pitch information of these tones. In this paper, we have introduced a new concept of fundamental score and its significance in a musical octave. We have applied autocorrelation method for the pitch extraction of musical notes in Indian Classical Music (ICM). We have tested this method on the data collected from male speech (sung by one of the authors) and a musical instrument, viz., Reed-Organ. The results were found to be quite accurate when compared with the standard pitch frequencies computed using the equal temperament musical tuning method. The advantage of the proposed scheme is that it does not require knowledge of the source (i.e., musical instrument) to estimate the musical notes.