I don't think I understand the problem here. You're providing an unexpected argument, and the error message says exactly that. What is misleading, or what would you expect it to say instead?

I think that the misleading element, according to @FVolral, is that the unexpected keyword argument is passed from tonnetz to chroma_cqt, so the TypeError is thrown in the latter whereas the user called the former. So from my understanding, it's not at all a typo but a question about the way of handling exceptions when our functions have keyword arguments.

If my understanding is right, then I think that librosa is working as intended here, and consistently with packages like NumPy or Matplotlib. @FVolral try running plt.plot([0, 1, 2], unexpected='arg') and you'll see a similar behavior:

AttributeError: Line2D.set() got an unexpected keyword argument 'unexpected'

The exception is thrown in Line2D.set, not in plot.

Ahh, I see. @lostanlen is correct - this is not copypasta, but instead an exception being raised one layer deeper in the call stack than the user might be expecting.

Since the underlying exception here is a TypeError, it would be impossible to wrap pass-through calls in a try/except block that would only trigger on unexpected keyword arguments.

Alternatively, we could imagine cooking up some machinery that would inspect the call signature of nested calls against the kwargs we're going to send through before calling, and raise an error earlier, but this seems like a pretty heavy-weight solution for a rather niche problem.

In general, I don't think there's too much we can do here, unless we want to go the route of explicitly registering all pass-through kwargs in the call signature. Given the complexity of the call signature already, I'm not inclined to go that route.