Pitch Detection Algorithm

Pitch Detection Algorithm

A pitch detection algorithm (PDA) is an algorithm designed to estimate the pitch or fundamental frequency of a quasiperiodic or virtually periodic signal, usually a digital recording of speech or a musical note or tone. This can be done in the time domain or the frequency domain or both the two domains.

PDAs are used in various contexts (e.g. phonetics, music information retrieval, speech coding, musical performance systems) and so there may be different demands placed upon the algorithm. There is as yet no single ideal PDA, so a variety of algorithms exist, most falling broadly into the classes given below.