Matlab implementation of a pitch/unpitched (voiced/unvoiced) detector

[Arturo Camacho <acamacho@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear members of the list:

I want to share with you my Matlab implementation of the
pitched/unpitched (voiced/unvoiced) detection algorithm I presented in
ISMIR 2008 [1]. It works by dynamically determining clusters of pitch
and unpitched sound using as criteria the maximization of the distance
between the clusters' centroids. Although the method was created for
doing pitch/unpitched detection, it is so general (i.e., except for
computational efficiency related parameters, it has no intrinsic free
parameters,) that I foresee its use in other areas in which the
identification of two relatively stable and separated classes in a
time series is required (e.g., sound/silence detection).

The algorithm is available in the URL
www.cise.ufl.edu/~acamacho/publications under the name 'ts2means.m'
(time-series 2-means). It takes as input the pitch strength trace of
the signal (which can be approximated as the height of the
autocorrelation function of the signal or using more sophisticated
methods like in [2-4]) and produces as output a binary trace where 1s
represent pitched sound and 0s represent unpitched sound. (BTW, that
URL also contains a Matlab implementation of the pitch and pitch
strength estimator in [3-4] under the name 'swipep.m'.)

I hope many people find this algorithm useful.

Sincerely,

Arturo

[1] Camacho, A. (2008). "Detection of Pitched/Unpitched Sound Using
Pitch Strength Clustering," Proceedings of the Ninth International
Conference on Music Information Retrieval, pp. 533-537.

[2] Shofner, W. P., and Selas, G. (2002). "Pitch strength and Stevens'
power law," Percept. Psychophys. 64, 437–450.

[3] Camacho, A. (2007). "SWIPE: A Sawtooth Waveform Inspired Pitch
Estimator for Speech and Music," doctoral dissertation, University of
Florida, Florida.

[4] Camacho, A. (2008). "A sawtooth waveform inspired pitch estimator
for speech and music," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124, 1638-1652.

-- 
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Arturo Camacho, PhD
Alumni
Computer and Information Science and Engineering
University of Florida

E-mail: acamacho@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web page: www.cise.ufl.edu/~acamacho
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