Music Melodic Pattern Detection with Pitch Estimation Algorithms

Music acoustics is an interdisciplinary field and mathematics is the basis in the music art form. Music and mathematics correlation exist since the inception of music. Various philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and musicians have expressed their views about this relationship. This paper attempts to explore this association with focus on melodic pattern identification. Mathematics in Indian Classical music with raga as the basis and just intonation tuning system is discussed. Indian vocal music clips are used for different pitch estimation algorithms in the experimentation. Harmonic product spectrum and auto-correlation algorithms are tested for accurate pitch estimation. Enhanced auto-correlation function using audio segmentation is compared with other approaches for effective pitch extraction. Results indicate pitch extraction with enhanced auto-correlation function provides accurate results as compared with other approaches tested.