Vocal music is characterized by a melodically salient singing voice accompanied by one or more instruments. With a pitched instrument background, multiple periodicities are simultaneously present and the task becomes one of identifying and tracking the vocal pitch based on pitch strength and smoothness constraints. Frequency domain harmonic matching methods can be applied to detect pitch via the harmonically related frequencies that fit the signal’s measured spectral peaks. The specific spectral fitness measure is expected to influence the performance of vocal pitch detection depending on the nature of the polyphonic mixture. In this work, we consider Indian classical music which provides important examples of singing voice accompanied by strongly pitched instruments. It is shown that the spectral fitness measure of the two-way mismatch method is well suited to track vocal pitch in the presence of the pitched percussion with its strong but sparse harmonic structure. The detected pitch is further used to obtain a measure of voicing that reliably discriminates vocal segments from purely instrumental regions.

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The suitability of optimal path finding methods for vocal melody extraction in polyphonic music is well recognized since they combine local pitch strength and temporal smoothness considerations in a global sense. However, when such single-F0 tracking systems are applied to sound mixtures in which pitched accompaniment is of comparable strength to the singing voice, they suffer from irrecoverable degradations. In this study we investigate the use of an optimal path finding method that is allowed to dynamically track multiple F0 paths, specifically two, through the F0 candidate space. It is shown that when such a system is applied to typical polyphonic mixtures with vocal solo the melodic information is indeed retrieved. Audio examples are available at http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/daplab/DualF0TrackingResults_DAFx

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