Today’s Most Frequently Used F₀ Estimation Methods, and Their Accuracy in Estimating Male and Female Pitch in Clean Speech

Sofia Strömbergsson

Variation in fundamental frequency (F₀) constitutes a valuable source of information for researches across many disciplines, with a shared interest in speech. Different methods for estimating F₀ vary in estimation accuracy and accessibility, and there is yet no gold standard. Through a bibliometric survey, this study examines what methods were the most frequently used in the speech scientific community during the years 2010–2016. Secondly, the most used methods are evaluated against a ground truth reference, with a specific focus on their accuracy in estimating F₀ in male and female speakers, respectively.

The results show that Praat is the dominant method by far, followed by STRAIGHT, RAPT and YIN. This pattern holds across a range of different research areas, although within Acoustics and Engineering, Praat’s dominance is less pronounced. In the evaluation including Praat, RAPT and YIN — with their default and gender-adapted settings — Praat also proved to be the most accurate. The finding that adapting Praat’s pitch range settings by gender leads to further improvements should encourage researchers to do this routinely.

doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2016-240

Cite as: Strömbergsson, S. (2016) Today’s Most Frequently Used F₀ Estimation Methods, and Their Accuracy in Estimating Male and Female Pitch in Clean Speech. Proc. Interspeech 2016, 525-529, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2016-240

@inproceedings{strombergsson16_interspeech,
  author={Sofia Strömbergsson},
  title={{Today’s Most Frequently Used F0 Estimation Methods, and Their Accuracy in Estimating Male and Female Pitch in Clean Speech}},
  year=2016,
  booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2016},
  pages={525--529},
  doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2016-240}
}