We benchmark eleven audio classification methods: five task-aware closed-set LLMs (four Gemini models plus open-weight Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct), four fixed-vocabulary taggers (YAMNet, PANNs, Whisper-AT, and SSLAM), a zero-shot audio-text model (CLAP), and an audio-grounded LLM (BAT). We evaluate them on a closed-set sound-source identification task over 2,242 clips spanning 23 fine-grained classes and 11 categories.
arXiv:2511. 05550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) leverage multimodal representations to generate open-ended answers to natural language queries about audio.
By Daniel Chenyu Lin, Michael Freeman, John Thickstun
arXiv:2605. 03395v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Music popularity prediction has attracted growing research interest, with relevance to artists, platforms, and recommendation systems.
By Jaavid Aktar Husain, Dorien Herremans
arXiv:2608. 14819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music foundation models are commonly used as frozen audio feature extractors, yet selecting which layer to extract from remains largely heuristic.
By Angelos-Nikolaos Kanatas, Yuexuan Kong, Pablo Alonso-Jim\'enez, Xavier Serra, Dmitry Bogdanov
arXiv:2603. 00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind.
By Yinghao Ma, Haiwen Xia, Hewei Gao, Weixiong Chen, Yuxin Ye, Yuchen Yang, Sungkyun Chang, Mingshuo Ding, Yizhi Li, Ruibin Yuan, Simon Dixon, Emmanouil Benetos
arXiv:2607. 22413v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sample retrieval tools can help composers find harmonically compatible material, but querying from a fixed reference sample becomes less informative as arrangements evolve and the harmonic context shifts with each musical decision.
By Austin Rockman
arXiv:2606. 17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip.
By Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia, Yinghao Ma, Junghyun Koo, Koichi Saito, Yuki Mitsufuji, Chris Donahue
arXiv:2606. 00125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music recommendation systems typically treat songs as opaque tokens, relying on collaborative interaction histories which overlooks semantic or acoustic content.
By Srikar Prabhas Kandagatla, Sreehitha R. Narayana, Chandana Magapu, Swetha Mohan, Shamanth Kuthpadi, Hongjie Chen, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nesreen Ahmed
arXiv:2607. 27909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Objective evaluation of expressive MIDI piano performances typically relies on attribute statistics such as timing, velocity, and duration of individual notes.
By Dmitrii Gavrilev, Ilya Borovik, Vladimir Viro
arXiv:2509. 22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks.
By Pooneh Mousavi, Lovenya Jain, Mirco Ravanelli, Cem Subakan
Objective evaluation of expressive MIDI piano performances typically relies on attribute statistics such as timing, velocity, and duration of individual notes. However, these methods often disregard dependencies between notes, which poses a potential limitation in assessing the similarity between two sets of performances.
arXiv:2607. 00777v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recognizing jazz standards from audio is a challenging form of tune-level music retrieval: different performances of the same standard may vary in tempo, key, arrangement, instrumentation, improvisational content, and even whether the head melody is present.
By \c{C}a\u{g}r{\i} Eser