An experimental comparison of fundamental frequency tracking algorithms

“Yet another Algorithm for Pitch Tracking -YAAPT” was published in a 2010 JASA paper (Zahorian and Hu). Although demonstrated to provide high accuracy and noise robustness for fundamental frequency tracking for both studio quality speech and telephone speech, especially as compared to other well-known algorithms (YIN, Praat, RAPT), YAAPT has not been widely used, possibly due to the difficulty of using it and uncertainty about its effectiveness for difficult conditions. Therefore, more work has been done to improve the algorithm and especially to improve its functionality and ease of use as MATLAB functions. In the present paper, the current version of YAAPT is presented, along with clear documentation for using it, both stand alone and as a function to be called by another program. Experimentally, YAAPT is compared with YIN, Praat, RAPT, and a cepstrum method for studio bandwidth speech and telephone speech for a variety of noise conditions. Experiments are conducted with multiple databases, including American English, British English, and Mandarin Chinese. For most conditions evaluated, YAAPT gives better performance than the other fundamental frequency trackers.