On Harmonic Approximations of Inharmonic Signals

In this work, we present the misspecified Gaussian Cramér-Rao lower bound for the parameters of a harmonic signal, or pitch, when signal measurements are collected from an almost, but not quite, harmonic model. For the asymptotic case of large sample sizes, we present a closed-form expression for the bound corresponding to the pseduo-true fundamental frequency. Using simulation studies, it is shown that the bound is sharp and is attained by maximum likelihood estimators derived under the misspecified harmonic assumption. It is shown that misspecified harmonic models achieve a lower mean squared error than correctly specified unstructured models for moderately inharmonic signals. Examining voices from a speech database, we conclude that human speech belongs to this class of signals, verifying that the use of a harmonic model for voiced speech is preferable.