I would like to know if pitch detection is a solved theme for an instrument like a bass (bass tones).
Is it, or there is always a percentage of error rate on the detection?
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$\begingroup$ wait, a bass doesn't even have discrete tones, how can you have an error rate? $\endgroup$ – Marcus Müller Jun 20 '20 at 10:43
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1$\begingroup$ And it seems your definition of "solved estimation problem" is "makes no errors". Bad news: according to that definition, there's no solved noisy estimation problems out there, at all, and there won't ever be. $\endgroup$ – Marcus Müller Jun 20 '20 at 10:45
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2$\begingroup$ Defining pitch, much less than solving for it, is even difficult as overtones aren't always harmonic. Check this out: dsprelated.com/thread/7902/… $\endgroup$ – Cedron Dawg Jun 20 '20 at 11:29
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2$\begingroup$ If you want the frequency of the fundamental tone, I would suggest this approach: dsprelated.com/showarticle/1284.php On a pure tone, it is exact. This is different than pitch. Pitch is what it sounds like. You can have a waveform with the fundamental missing, yet the pitch is still at the fundamental. $\endgroup$ – Cedron Dawg Jun 20 '20 at 17:42
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1$\begingroup$ Pitch is a perceptual metric, which means it’s not directly quantifiable. Pitch detection is a process by which features of a waveform can be correlated to our perception, but it cannot be equated, and as such can not be directly solved. There are pitch detection algorithms, some of which work better than others, but any error rate would require a presumption of what is correct. In reality, the best metric is probably whether or not people think it works. $\endgroup$ – Dan Szabo Jun 20 '20 at 17:59
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Pitch is a human psychoacoustic perception phenomena, so an absolute ground truth might not be well defined enough to “solve”, except in some statistical sense, especially for a string bass, whose waveforms can evolve over time in both frequency and inharmonic as well as harmonic spectral composition.
A pure perfect periodicity for many natural sounds does not exist, which is likely part of what makes them interesting enough to want to hear them.
