arXiv:2607. 13587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic symbolic music analysis has made substantial progress, yet existing systems are typically designed for a single mode of use, such as full-score prediction, and therefore do not match the broader range of operations that arise in analysis workflows, including partial completion, local correction, and iterative refinement.
ONOTE is a unified framework that treats music as a scientifically structured domain of measurable cross-representation correspondences, focusing on omnimodal notation processing centered on sheet music. It introduces a test-only benchmark drawing from diverse musical sources—including staff, Jianpu, and tablature—across varied genres, instruments, and structural conditions, with aligned multimodal derivatives. The framework supports four complementary tasks—score understanding, notation conversion, audio transcription, and symbolic generation—while constructing a provenance-bearing proposition hypergraph from external music-theory materials for evidence retrieval and deterministic validity checks.
The paper introduces the first general-purpose tokenisation framework for MusicXML and evaluates its impact on deep learning models for symbolic music. By training 26 autoregressive and masked language models, the authors compare MusicXML tokenisation against MIDI and ABC-based representations, exploring different tokenisation strategies and music-grammar-aware approaches. The study demonstrates that MusicXML-tokenised models outperform MIDI and text-based counterparts on both music understanding tasks (composer classification, difficulty estimation, accompaniment suggestion) and generative tasks, as shown by objective metrics and a human preference study.
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.
Chordonomicon is a new dataset of over 666,000 song-level symbolic chord progressions, each annotated with structural parts such as verse, chorus, and bridge, as well as genre and release date. The dataset was compiled by scraping user-generated progressions from multiple sources and shows strong similarity to established prior datasets. The authors also provide a reproducible benchmark suite for next chord prediction, evaluating RNN, GRU, and LSTM models across various context windows and data scales, and find that structural part annotations consistently improve prediction performance.
arXiv:2606. 06615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving music using natural language descriptions has improved with contrastive audio-text models such as CLAP, but current systems remain limited to coarse semantic queries.
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.
MUUNRiver-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark for music retrieval that uses natural‑language instructions to define relevance for reference‑audio queries. It contains 3,440 tracks across 13 genres and 116 sub‑genres and covers seven tasks such as similar‑music, style‑preserving lyric‑rewriting, cover, and segment retrieval. Experiments with six models in eight configurations show that acoustic encoders favor local identity while text‑aligned encoders favor semantic relations, and that instruction‑aware and audio‑text fusion systems do not consistently outperform their backbones.
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. 24873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in AI music generation have enabled users to create complete musical pieces from natural-language prompts.
TTM-Bench is a framework designed to benchmark text-to-music systems by establishing a common protocol for reproducible evaluation. It measures performance along two axes: musical-content alignment—assessed through semantic, genre, and musical-descriptor agreement scores against a shared musical specification—and computational efficiency, which includes generation latency, real-time factor, resource usage for local models, and cost for hosted services. A preliminary case study using TTM-Bench shows that higher alignment does not necessarily mean lower computational demands, underscoring the need for distinct, interpretable metrics.
Recent advances in AI music generation have enabled users to create complete musical pieces from natural-language prompts. However, most existing systems follow a prompt-and-regenerate paradigm, making iterative refinement difficult because users must repeatedly recreate compositions instead of directly evolving existing musical ideas.