Pitch contours and their potential for rhythm analysis
Pitch contour tracking in polyphonic music concerns the estimation of the fundamental frequency trajectories of tonal instruments. With a sufficiently descriptive feature set, pitch contours can be grouped in various ways including identifying melodic content or content from a specific instrument. The characteristics of these contours (such as vibrato, duration and pitch height) can be further exploited for computational musicology studies. As an example, we present results from a recent study on the large scale analysis of a corpus of world music based on automatically estimated pitch contours. We describe the current state of the art in pitch contour tracking and propose yet to be explored avenues for their exploitation for rhythm analysis.