Impact of Distance in Pitch Class Profile Computation

Giordano Cabral
Jean-Pierre Briot

Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
8 Rue du Capitaine Scott 75018 Paris ­ France

François Pachet

Sony Computer Science Lab Paris
6 Rue Amyot 75005 Paris ­ France


Abstract:

Pitch Class Profiles (PCP) [Fujishima 1999] are largely used for all applications involving harmonic content. Although the main steps of the PCP calculation are generally equal over all the scientific literature, some implementation details may vary, specially the impact of the distance between the frequency of the FFT bins and their closest note. This paper compares 6 ways of usingthis distance to weight the contribution of each FFT bin in the final PCP vector. We present the results of the 6 computed PCPs when used in a chord recognizer, a tonality estimator and a key detector.

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