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Main Authors: Abeßer, Jakob, Schwär, Simon, Müller, Meinard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19161
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author Abeßer, Jakob
Schwär, Simon
Müller, Meinard
author_facet Abeßer, Jakob
Schwär, Simon
Müller, Meinard
contents This study examines pitch contours as a unifying semantic construct prevalent across various audio domains including music, speech, bioacoustics, and everyday sounds. Analyzing pitch contours offers insights into the universal role of pitch in the perceptual processing of audio signals and contributes to a deeper understanding of auditory mechanisms in both humans and animals. Conventional pitch-tracking methods, while optimized for music and speech, face challenges in handling much broader frequency ranges and more rapid pitch variations found in other audio domains. This study introduces a vision-based approach to pitch contour analysis that eliminates the need for explicit pitch-tracking. The approach uses a convolutional neural network, pre-trained for object detection in natural images and fine-tuned with a dataset of synthetically generated pitch contours, to extract key contour parameters from the time-frequency representation of short audio segments. A diverse set of eight downstream tasks from four audio domains were selected to provide a challenging evaluation scenario for cross-domain pitch contour analysis. The results show that the proposed method consistently surpasses traditional techniques based on pitch-tracking on a wide range of tasks. This suggests that the vision-based approach establishes a foundation for comparative studies of pitch contour characteristics across diverse audio domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19161
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pitch Contour Exploration Across Audio Domains: A Vision-Based Transfer Learning Approach
Abeßer, Jakob
Schwär, Simon
Müller, Meinard
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
This study examines pitch contours as a unifying semantic construct prevalent across various audio domains including music, speech, bioacoustics, and everyday sounds. Analyzing pitch contours offers insights into the universal role of pitch in the perceptual processing of audio signals and contributes to a deeper understanding of auditory mechanisms in both humans and animals. Conventional pitch-tracking methods, while optimized for music and speech, face challenges in handling much broader frequency ranges and more rapid pitch variations found in other audio domains. This study introduces a vision-based approach to pitch contour analysis that eliminates the need for explicit pitch-tracking. The approach uses a convolutional neural network, pre-trained for object detection in natural images and fine-tuned with a dataset of synthetically generated pitch contours, to extract key contour parameters from the time-frequency representation of short audio segments. A diverse set of eight downstream tasks from four audio domains were selected to provide a challenging evaluation scenario for cross-domain pitch contour analysis. The results show that the proposed method consistently surpasses traditional techniques based on pitch-tracking on a wide range of tasks. This suggests that the vision-based approach establishes a foundation for comparative studies of pitch contour characteristics across diverse audio domains.
title Pitch Contour Exploration Across Audio Domains: A Vision-Based Transfer Learning Approach
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19161