Librosa pitch tracking - STFT

Question

I am using this algorithm to detect the pitch of this audio file. As you can hear, it is an E2 note played on a guitar with a bit of noise in the background.

I gene

Answer 1

Pitch detection is a tricky topic and is often counter-intuitive. I'm not wild about the way the source code is documented for this particular function -- it almost seems like the developer is confusing a 'harmonic' with a 'pitch'.

When a single note (a 'pitch') is made on a guitar or piano, what we hear is not just one frequency of sound vibration, but a composite of multiple sound vibrations occurring at different mathematically related frequencies, called harmonics. Typical pitch tracking techniques include searching the results of a FFT for magnitudes in certain bins that correspond to the expected frequencies of harmonics. For instance, if we press the Middle C key on the piano, the individual frequencies of the composite's harmonics will start at 261.6 Hz as the fundamental frequency, 523 Hz would be the 2nd Harmonic, 785 Hz would be the 3rd Harmonic, 1046 Hz would be the 4th Harmonic, etc. The later harmonics are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, 261.6 Hz ( ex: 2 x 261.6 = 523, 3 x 261.6 = 785, 4 x 261.6 = 1046 ). However, the frequencies where harmonics are located are logarithmically spaced, but the FFT uses a linear spacing. Often the vertical spacing for FFTs are not resolved enough at the lower frequencies.

For that reason when I wrote a pitch detecting application (PitchScope Player), I chose to create a logarithmically spaced DFT, rather than a FFT, so I could focus on the precise frequencies of interest for music ( see the attached diagram of my custom DFT from 3 seconds of a guitar solo ). If you are serious about pursuing pitch detection, you should consider doing more reading into the topic, looking at other sample code (mine is linked below), and consider writing your own functions to measure frequency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_(music)#Pitch_detection

https://github.com/CreativeDetectors/PitchScope_Player