Reducing Noise and Artifacts with the Pitch Function

Hi everyone!

I am using the pitch function on short audio files of speech utterences (usually less than 1 second long).

p = pitch(aud,app.recObj.SampleRate,'WindowLength',round(fs*.05));

However, when I do this, I usually get an output with a very low sampling rate that is rich with artifacts.

How can I make it so I it outputs at a higher sampling rate (I'm recording at 44100Hz), and remove artifacts? I've tried using a smaller window, but that usually ends up with the error "Invalid window length".

An example is provided below.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[jibrahim]

Hi Manash,

If you want the rate of pitch estimates to be higher, you will need to increase the overlap length:

p = pitch(aud,app.recObj.SampleRate,'WindowLength',round(fs*.05),'OverlapLength',round(fs*.05)-1);

This will generate a pitch estimate for windows with a maximum overlap.

I suggest you first throw away silence from your signal (using the function detectSpeech) before getting the pitch. That will eliminate parts of the signal where pitch does not apply.

You can further smooth the signal with median filtering. There is a parameter on this function that allows you to control the length of the median filter.

[Manash Sahoo]

You rock! Thank you so much!