An analysis/synthesis framework for automatic f0 annotation of multitrack datasets

Generating continuous f₀ annotations for tasks such as melody extraction and multiple f₀ estimation typically involves running a monophonic pitch tracker on each track of a multitrack recording and manually correcting any estimation errors. This process is labor intensive and time consuming, and consequently existing annotated datasets are very limited in size. In this paper we propose a framework for automatically generating continuous f₀ annotations without requiring manual refinement: the estimate of a pitch tracker is used to drive an analysis/synthesis pipeline which produces a synthesized version of the track. Any estimation errors are now reflected in the synthesized audio, meaning the tracker's output represents an accurate annotation. Analysis is performed using a wide-band harmonic sinusoidal modeling algorithm which estimates the frequency, amplitude and phase of every harmonic, meaning the synthesized track closely resembles the original in terms of timbre and dynamics. Finally the synthesized track is automatically mixed back into the multitrack. The framework can be used to annotate multitrack datasets for training learning-based algorithms. Furthermore, we show that algorithms evaluated on the automatically generated/annotated mixes produce results that are statistically indistinguishable from those they produce on the original, manually annotated, mixes. We release a software library implementing the proposed framework, along with new datasets for melody, bass and multiple f₀ estimation.