Estimation Of Saxophone Alternate Fingerings’ Configurations

A method to estimate the saxophone fingerings’ configurations is presented. This is not solely a problem of pitch detection since a sounding pitch can be produced by multiple fingering configurations. The widely used spectral envelope technique in similar problem of speech analysis as a vocal tract impulse response is not sufficient to solve the problem because a player can alter the envelope by controlling the reed vibration through embouchure and blowing pressure. Motivated by Saxophone playing technique, a theoretical model is proposed based on sub harmonics’ and main harmonics’ positions to identify fingerings by measuring the similarity of the input sound spectrum peaks’ positions and models. The proposed method has achieved the accuracy of 73% on a dataset of Bb tenor saxophone recordings, the result has been improved to 87% with combination of pitch as a complementary feature.