On the Definition of Musical Notes from Pitch Tracks for Melody Detection in Polyphonic Recordings
The present study addresses the problem of defining musical notes from pitch tracks, in the context of a system for melody detection in polyphonic musical signals. This is an important issue for melody transcription, as well as melody-based music information retrieval. Previous work in the area tackled mainly the extraction of melodic pitch lines, without explicit determination of musical notes. Therefore, in this paper we propose an approach for the creation of musical notes based on a two-stage segmentation of pitch tracks. In the first step, frequency-based segmentation is carried out through the detection of frequency variations in pitch tracks. In the second stage, salience-based segmentation is performed so as to split consecutive notes with equal value, by making use of salience minima and note onsets.