Tonic Pitch Estimation in Turkish Music Using Modified Group Delay Processing

Abstract

Group delay processing of audio signals has been extensively studied in the last decade. In this paper, tonic estimation in Turkish makam music is addressed using modified group delay processing. Tonic is one of the stable pitches of the performance, which serves as the reference throughout the performance. The proposed methodology does not require metadata such as the melodic pitch values of the audio files for tonic estimation. Modified group delay functions (MODGD) computed from the flattened music spectrum of non-melodic segments are bin-wise summed to form a summary-modgdgram. The peak position in the tonic range of summary-modgdgram is mapped to the tonic pitch. Two corpora of the Turkish music tonic dataset, created by the CompMusic project group, are used to assess the system. The proposed methodology outperforms the baseline last note detection (LND) method, which uses pitch contour as a prerequisite for tonic estimation. The results show the potential of processing audio signals using the phase-based approach in tonic pitch estimation.