PESTO - pitch detection algorithm

rodrigo.constanzo · February 4, 2026, 2:46pm

Much like the Hz thread from a while back I came across this newer algorithm today by Sony called PESTO : Pitch Estimation with Self-supervised Transposition-equivariant Objective.

Basically a neural pitch detection algorithm.

Someone’s made a Max external, which is handy: pesto~.

I had a quick play with it and although at smaller block sizes it’s quite shit, at 1024 (the default it seems), the tracking is really nice. Quite a bit better than Yin.

Obviously there’s so many other things that would be interesting to have (if/when dev time comes up), but just wanted to post this here in case it’s of interest as more cutting edge pitch detection algorithms (whereas I don’t think Hz is so cutting edge, more just use-case-optimized).

tedmoore · February 4, 2026, 8:12pm

That’s cool. Can you give us a bit of quantization on this, maybe a plots and stats comparing the two?

rodrigo.constanzo · February 4, 2026, 8:46pm

Not gone that deep with it, just did some A/B-ing with it in patches and listening.

Don’t really know what kind of material would be suitable for quantifying the difference.

Actually here’s a quick screen capture:

tedmoore · February 4, 2026, 9:07pm

nice. thanks for the demo!

tremblap · February 12, 2026, 2:21pm

can you compare with pesto @conf 0.70or fftyin with threshold at 0.98? What I hear is yin spitting pitch with low (0.7 is low) confidence…

it does look fast though

rodrigo.constanzo · February 13, 2026, 9:58am

Here’s a follow up video showing some more.

It seems like the confidence in pesto is way stickier/better (even with this funky vocal sample), and also seems to track the microtonal stuff even better (by comparison the yin sounds a bit sharp most of the time).

tremblap · February 13, 2026, 10:34am

it is indeed more accurate, sad that the license is not compatible (iirc) we could have, eventually, incorporated it. How’s the cpu usage?

rodrigo.constanzo · February 13, 2026, 4:50pm

github.com/SonyCSLParis/pesto

LICENSE.md

master

GNU Lesser General Public License
=================================

_Version 3, 29 June 2007_  
_Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;<http://fsf.org/>&gt;_

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.


This version of the GNU Lesser General Public License incorporates
the terms and conditions of version 3 of the GNU General Public
License, supplemented by the additional permissions listed below.

### 0. Additional Definitions

As used herein, “this License” refers to version 3 of the GNU Lesser
General Public License, and the “GNU GPL” refers to version 3 of the GNU
General Public License.

This file has been truncated. show original

I don’t know this stuff too well, but I guess this means it’s GPL3.

Crazy crazy cheaper. Like, crazy.

yin seems to move between 17% and 45% whereas PESTO stays between 3-4% (for 100 instances of each).

Yin:

Pesto: