How to extract the pitch of a signal ?

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Patient Tchamson
Patient Tchamson on 11 Aug 2016
Commented: Image Analyst on 18 May 2022
Hello everybody, I am new to Matlab and I'm trying to extract the pitch of an speech signal but I don't have the signal and I have the below information:
  1. A vector of frequency
  2. A vector of time
  3. A vector of Instantaneous Loudness Level
  4. A histogram giving the Loudness Level versus time and frequency (spectrogram)
  5. If anyone knows how to re-synthesize a signal with this information, it'll be very useful and easy to extract the pitch.
Thank you everyone for your help

Answers (2)

Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 11 Aug 2016
What do you mean by pitch? Each stretch of time has a frequency range. spectrogram() shows you that. Maybe you just want to pick out the highest magnitude frequency for that chunk of time. From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_(music)
Pitch is an auditory sensation in which a listener assigns musical tones to relative positions on a musical scale based primarily on their perception of the frequency of vibration.[6] Pitch is closely related to frequency, but the two are not equivalent. Frequency is an objective, scientific attribute that can be measured. Pitch is each person's subjective perception of a sound wave, which cannot be directly measured. However, this does not necessarily mean that most people won't agree on which notes are higher and lower.
Sound waves themselves do not have pitch, but their oscillations can be measured to obtain a frequency. It takes a sentient mind to map the internal quality of pitch.
  2 Comments
Patient Tchamson
Patient Tchamson on 12 Aug 2016
Edited: Patient Tchamson on 12 Aug 2016
Hi, Here pitch mean fundamental frequency (The fundamental frequency is a measure of high or low frequency of a person's voice sounds). For example research has showed that A typical adult male will have a average fundamental frequency from 80 to 180 Hz, and that of a typical adult female from 165 to 255 Hz. Children and babies have even higher fundamental frequencies. Infants show a range of 250 to 600 Hz. A 10-year-old boy or girl might have a fundamental frequency around 400 Hz.there are several pitch extraction methods see: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58.834&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 12 Aug 2016
Well, like I said, then just pick out the max of the spectrum. You can either use spectrogram() if you want the peak (dominant frequency) as a function of time, or you can take the whole waveform and use pwelch(), or fft() if you don't have the Signal Processing Toolbox, which would be fine if you don't expect the dominant frequency to change over the length of the sound. See help demos for pwelch().
[signal, Fs] = audioread('guitartune.wav'); % Open demo sound
spectrum = pwelch(signal);
plot(10*log10(spectrum))
drawnow;
sound(signal, Fs);

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Manpreet Sivia
Manpreet Sivia on 1 Jun 2017
how to extract pitch of sound file without using toolbox functions

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