Tracking of partials for additive sound synthesis using hidden Markov models

The authors present a sinusoidal partial tracking method for additive synthesis of sound. Partials are tracked by identifying time functions of parameters as underlying trajectories in a successive set of spectral peaks. This is done by a purely combinatorial hidden Markov model. A partial trajectory is considered as a time sequence of peaks which satisfies continuity constraints on parameter slopes. The method allows frequency line crossing and can be used for formant tracking.<>