Music transcription using an instrument model

Abstract

We introduce a method to transcribe music with the help of an instrument model. One of the most important and difficult problems in music transcription is polyphonic pitch estimation. Common pitch estimation algorithms reported in the literature tend to have errors in the following three situations: missing fundamental, missing harmonics, and shared frequencies. We believe an instrument model can make pitch estimation more robust in these three situations and thus can help to improve music transcription accuracy. We devise a spectrum subtraction algorithm to transcribe single and multiple instrument polyphonic music. ©2005 IEEE.