Patent 10460711 was granted and assigned to Smule on October, 2019 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Digital signal processing and machine learning techniques can be employed in a vocal capture and performance social network to computationally generate vocal pitch tracks from a collection of vocal performances captured against a common temporal baseline such as a backing track or an original performance by a popularizing artist. In this way, crowd-sourced pitch tracks may be generated and distributed for use in subsequent karaoke-style vocal audio captures or other applications. Large numbers of performances of a song can be used to generate a pitch track. Computationally determined pitch trackings from individual audio signal encodings of the crowd-sourced vocal performance set are aggregated and processed as an observation sequence of a trained Hidden Markov Model (HMM) or other statistical model to produce an output pitch track.