Optimizing Chew and Chen's Pitch-Spelling Algorithm

This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material. Duplication or sale of all or part of any of the GRO Data Collections is not permitted, and no quotation or excerpt from the work may be published without the prior written consent of the copyright holder/s. Pitch-spelling algorithms attempt to compute the correct pitch names (e.g., C#4, B ♭ 5) of the notes in a passage of tonal music, when given only the onset time, MIDI note number, and possibly the duration and voice of each note. This article reports on a study in which Chew and Chen's (2003a, 2003b, 2005) pitch-spelling algorithm was re-implemented and then optimized by running it with a range of different parameter value combinations on a test corpus containing 195,972 notes and consisting of 216 movements from works by eight Baroque and Classical composers. The results of this evaluation cast doubt upon some of the claims made by Chew and Chen that were based on results obtained by running their algorithm on a much smaller test corpus containing only 4,462 notes and consisting of just two movements from sonatas by Beethoven and You-Di Huang's Song of Ali-Shan. The results presented here suggest that Chew and Chen's algorithm could be simplified in various ways without compromising its performance.