Meta-song evaluation for chord recognition

We present a new approach to evaluate chord recognition systems on songs which do not have full annotations. The principle is to use online chord databases to generate high accurate “pseudo annotations” for these songs and compute “pseudo accuracies” of test systems. Statistical models that model the relationship between “pseudo accuracy” and real performance are then applied to estimate test systems’ performance. The approach goes beyond the existing evaluation metrics, allowing us to carry out extensive analysis on chord recognition systems, such as their generalizations to different genres. In the experiments we applied this method to evaluate three state-of-the-art chord recognition systems, of which the results verified its reliability.