Subject: A phonetician's comment on Dmitry Terez's pitch determinator From: Dinoj Surendran <dinoj(at)CS.UCHICAGO.EDU> Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 20:17:50 -0500Dear list, One of the major users of a pitch tracking algorithm would be experimental phoneticians, particularly those whose investigations include prosody and tones. I told one of them, Yi Xu (xuyi(at)uchicago.edu) about the new algorithm and asked him what he thought. He's given me permission to post his reply to the list : >On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Yi Xu wrote: > >> Dinoj, >> > > I tried the demo and it even skipped the creaky part in the example > sentence he gave. I also tried a few of our own wave files. Pitch of the > voiced sections are frequently missed. While there may be a gem hidden > in the algorithm, the author apparently are not really familiar with all > the hurdles a real-life pitch extraction algorithm has to be able to > handle. > > Basically, a pitch extraction algorithm with superiority claims should > at least show that it can handle all the well-known difficulties in > pitch extraction, including pitch halfing, pitch doubling, voicing > detection, glottalization, etc. I have yet to see any pitch extraction > algorithm handle these problems better than the semi-manual procedure I > have been using for my own research. I look forward to the day when an > algorithm can meet my stringent but very reasonable standard. If the > author truly believes that the algorithm has the potential to solve all > these problems, I will be happy to show him some concrete examples. But > as a first step, he should at least give us a flawless demo :-). > > Yi Hopefully the algorithm can be modified to deal with the problems laid out above. Dinoj Surendran Graduate Student Department of Computer Science University of Chicago http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj