Pitch Smoothing Using Relative Interval Networks

Pitch tracking systems typically couple a per-frame fundamental frequency ($F_0$) estimator with a temporal smoothing stage to obtain continuous trajectories. Conventional Viterbi smoothers enforce first-order continuity but lack long-term temporal awareness and could lock into octave errors across corrupted frames. We propose Relative Interval Networks (RIN), a trajectory smoothing framework that reconciles per-frame pitch estimates with data-driven multi-hop pitch differences. We extract robust relative pitch intervals across arbitrary frame offsets using Variable-Q Transform cross-correlation. We formulate pitch smoothing as an $L_1$-norm optimization problem and prove its equivalence to a minimum cost circulation problem, solved efficiently via linear programming. Evaluations across speech, singing, and instrumental datasets show that RIN substantially improves weak estimators, matches or outperforms Viterbi decoding at a comparable computational cost, and provides superior robustness under certain acoustic degradation.