Compactness in the Euler-Lattice: A Parsimonious Pitch Spelling Model

Abstract

Compactness and convexity have been shown to represent important principles in music, reflecting a notion of consonance in scales and chords, and have been successfully applied to well-known problems from music research. In this paper, the notion of compactness is applied to the problem of pitch spelling. Pitch spelling addresses the question of how to derive traditional score notation from 12-tone pitch classes or MIDI. This paper proposes a pitch spelling algorithm that is based on only one principle: compactness in the Euler-lattice. Generally, the goodness of a pitch spelling model is measured in terms of its spelling accuracy. In this paper, we concentrate on the parsimony, cognitive plausibility and generalizability of the model as well. The spelling accuracy of the algorithm was evaluated on the first book of Bach's Well-tempered Clavier and had a success rate of 99.21%. A qualitative discussion of the model's cognitive plausibility, its parsimony and its generalizability is given.