EC 4091: Digital Signal Processing Lab

ABSTRACT
GROUP 1 (Batch -1)

Lakshmi Haridasan Lakshmi Shivani Kota L. Akhil Reddy

B160043EC B160828EC B160522EC

Write a program to detect the pitch of your voice. Record your own voice to implement the
program.
The pitch of the voice is defined as the "rate of vibration of the vocal folds". The sound of the voice
changes as the rate of vibrations varies. As the number of vibrations per second increases, so does the
pitch, meaning the voice would sound higher. Faster rates form higher voices, or higher pitches, while
slower rates elicit deeper voices, or lower pitches. Pitch detection algorithm (PDA) is an algorithm
designed to estimate the pitch or fundamental frequency of a quasiperiodic or oscillating signal, usually
a digital recording of speech or a musical note or tone. Pitch detection is a huge field with many
different algorithms each with advantages and disadvantages. General approaches to measure the pitch
are zero-crossing rate, average magnitude difference function ,Average Squared Mean Difference
Function and autocorrelation function. Considering The signal to be complex we try to find the pitch
using autocorrelation where we calculate the frequency through comparing the positons of adjacent
local maxima.

The fundamental frequency of speech can vary from 40 Hz for low-pitched male voices to 600 Hz for
children or high-pitched female voices.

Autocorrelation methods need at least two pitch periods to detect pitch. This means that in order to
detect a fundamental frequency of 40 Hz, at least 50 milliseconds (ms) of the speech signal must be
analyzed.

Pitch detection algorithms use short-term analysis techniques. For every frame xm we get a score f(T|
xm) that is a function of the candidate pitch periods T.

For a nonstationary signal, such as speech, the concept of a long-time autocorrelation measurement is
not really meaningful. Thus, it is reasonable to define a short-time autocorrelation function, which
operates on short segments of the signal as:

where w(n) is an appropriate window for analysis, N is the section length being analyzed, N' is the number
of signal samples used in the computation of R(m), Mo is the number of autocorrelation points to be
computed, and l is the index of the starting sample of the frame.