ESPS Pitch Tracker Available!!!!

[Malcolm Slaney <malcolm@xxxxxxxx>]

At 10:17 AM 7/17/2003 -0400, Nicholas Smith wrote:
>Second, the practical. I'm looking for ways to implement these
>algorithms.

I've got really great news!!!!

The ESPS code, and David Talkin's Pitch Tracker is now available as open-source software (BSD license).  Hurray!!!   (This happened last year, I'm told, but somehow I missed the news.)

I think the ESPS pitch tracker has the best combination of wide distribution and very careful testing and benchmarking.  It is the benchmark algorithm I use to test the performance of all new pitch trackers.  I'm really happy that the code is available.  (I expect better pitch trackers to be developed now.  I for one, will not accept a pitch paper for publication unless they demonstrate better performance than Talkin's approach--or a similarly good tracker.  No excuses now!! :-).

A web page that overviews this pitch-tracking algorithm is at
        http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ws2000/presentations/preliminary/paul_bamberg/pitch_tracking.shtml
The chapter that gives all the details is:
         David Talkin, "A Robust Algorithm for Pitch Tracking (RAPT),"
         Ch. 14 in Kleijn and Paliwal, Speech Coding and Synthesis

The ESPS code is available under the KTH WaveSurfer page at
        http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/links.html
Look for the get_f0 routine in the ESPS code.

Note: The ESPS software was developed by AT&T and Entropic.  Entropic was then purchased by Microsoft.  Kudos to Microsoft,  AT&T, and KTH for making this software available!!!

-- Malcolm
P.S.  There are many different definitions of pitch.  This code corresponds to an engineering or speech-generation definition (i.e. what are the vocal chords doing).  This is not necessarily the same measure that a human might perceive, or that a psychoacoustic pitch model will produce.