PYIN Parameters¶

The pYIN plugin¶

Tony uses a Vamp plugin called pYIN for pitch and note analysis.

The plugin can be used in other Vamp plugin hosts as well: see the pYIN project page to download the plugin separately from Tony.

This page may be helpful if you need to get results from pYIN that match those generated in Tony (or vice versa).

pYIN parameters that Tony uses¶

pYIN has a number of processing parameters which can be adjusted, and Tony contains a number of options (on the Analysis menu) which adjust some of them. However, the names, identifiers, and default values of the pYIN parameters do not match those used in Tony. Generally this is because the parameters found in pYIN are continuous value ranges, while the settings in Tony are all on-off toggles.

Here is a table showing the correspondence between Tony menu options and pYIN parameters, as of Tony v2.1 and pYIN v1.1.

Tony option	pYIN parameter name	pYIN parameter id	pYIN parameter type	pYIN default value	Value when Tony option is on	Value when Tony option is off	Tony option default
Unbiased Timing (slow)	Use non-standard precise YIN timing (slow)	precisetime	Toggle	Off	On	Off	Off
Penalise Soft Pitches	Suppress low amplitude pitch estimates	lowampsuppression	Range 0.0-1.0	0.1	0.2	0.0	On
High Onset Sensitivity	Onset sensitivity	onsetsensitivity	Range 0.0-1.0	0.7	0.7	0.0	On
Drop Short Notes	Duration pruning threshold	prunethresh	Range 0.0-0.2	0.1	0.1	0.0	On

Note: There is a bug in Tony v2.1 (as well as earlier releases) in the handling of the "Penalise Soft Pitches" option. When you first run the application, this option is shown as ticked in the menu, but it is not actually activated when running pYIN (the pYIN parameter is instead set to 0.0). If you switch the option off and on again in the menu, or select "Reset Options to Defaults", then the parameter will subsequently be set correctly. This state is remembered in subsequent runs, so you only have to do this once. The bug will be fixed in Tony v2.1.1. This does unfortunately mean the behaviour of v2.1.1 "out of the box" will differ slightly from the (erroneous) first-run behaviour of v2.1.

Other pYIN parameters¶

There are also some parameters in pYIN that cannot be changed in Tony - the application leaves these all at their default values. They are:

pYIN parameter name	pYIN parameter id	pYIN parameter type	Default
Yin threshold distribution	threshdistr	8 distinct options	"Beta (mean 0.15)"
Fixed-lag smoothing	fixedlag	Toggle	On
Output estimates classified as unvoiced?	outputunvoiced	Three-way toggle	Off

How to set these parameters when using Sonic Annotator¶

(See also the Sonic Annotator documentation)

You can specify a plugin for Sonic Annotator using the -d (default) flag, which tells it to run a plugin with the default parameters:

$ sonic-annotator -d vamp:pyin:pyin:smoothedpitchtrack audio.wav -w csv --csv-one-file output.csv

But if you want to set any parameters to non-default values, you need a transform specification file. You can create a skeleton and then edit it:

$ sonic-annotator -s vamp:pyin:pyin:smoothedpitchtrack > pitchtrack.ttl

Then edit the file pitchtrack.ttl and change the parameter values in it. For example, you might change this block

    vamp:parameter_binding [
        vamp:parameter [ vamp:identifier "onsetsensitivity" ] ;
        vamp:value "0.7"^^xsd:float ;
    ] ;
    vamp:parameter_binding [
        vamp:parameter [ vamp:identifier "outputunvoiced" ] ;
        vamp:value "0"^^xsd:float ;
    ] ;

to

    vamp:parameter_binding [
        vamp:parameter [ vamp:identifier "onsetsensitivity" ] ;
        vamp:value "0.0"^^xsd:float ;
    ] ;
    vamp:parameter_binding [
        vamp:parameter [ vamp:identifier "outputunvoiced" ] ;
        vamp:value "2"^^xsd:float ;
    ] ;

to adjust the onset sensitivity and also tell pYIN to return negative values for unvoiced frames. Then run Sonic Annotator with this transform file:

$ sonic-annotator -t pitchtrack.ttl audio.wav -w csv --csv-one-file output.csv

Screenshots¶

Options in the Analysis menu of Tony that control pYIN parameters	Options available when using pYIN directly in Sonic Visualiser