A comparative analysis of time-frequency decompositions in polyphonic pitch estimation

In a monaural polyphonic music context, time-frequency information used by most of the multiple fundamental frequency estimation systems, extracted from temporal-domain of the polyphonic signal, is mainly computed using fixed-resolution or variable resolution time-frequency decompositions. This time-frequency information is crucial in the polyphonic estimation process because it must clearly represent all useful information in order to find the set of active pitches. In this paper, we present a preliminary study analyzing two different decompositions, Constant Q Transform and Short Time Fourier Transform, which are integrated in the same multiple fundamental frequency estimation system, with the aim of determining what decomposition is more suitable for polyphonic musical signal analysis and how each of them influences in the accuracy results of the polyphonic estimation considering low-middle-high frequency evaluation.