The paper investigates whether joint language‑audio embedding models encode human perceptual timbre semantics. It evaluates several state‑of‑the‑art models, finding that LAION‑CLAP aligns best with human‑perceived timbre across instrumental sounds and descriptor‑conditioned audio effects, yet the overall alignment remains limited. The study also notes that reverb‑induced timbre semantics are more consistently captured than equalization‑induced ones.
By Qixin Deng, Bryan Pardo, Thrasyvoulos N Pappas
arXiv:2512. 10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose audio representations aim to map acoustically variable instances of the same event to nearby points, resolving content identity in a zero-shot setting.
By Maris Basha, Anja Zai, Sabine Stoll, Richard Hahnloser
The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.
By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
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
MADS (Multi-view Acoustic Descriptor Set) is a compact 19‑dimensional, physics‑informed descriptor set designed to capture spectral, temporal, mechanical, and stochastic aspects of audio signals. Unlike traditional log‑mel or MFCC representations, MADS encodes excitation, damping, periodicity, impulsiveness, and structural consistency in a unified multi‑view format. Evaluated on ESC‑10, ESC‑50, and MSoS datasets with classical machine learning models, MADS outperforms conventional 26‑D MFCC and 38‑D spectral‑summary baselines, achieving 81.00% on ESC‑10, 52.78% on ESC‑50, and 67.48% on MSoS while using roughly half the dimensionality of the 38‑D baseline.
By Utsab Ghosh, Roshni Chakraborty
arXiv:2607. 08545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end neural audio models achieve high-fidelity compression and generation.
By Nicole Cosme-Clifford
arXiv:2605.27840v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Audio tokenizers are fundamental to unifying audio understanding and generation. Understanding requires high-level semantics, while generatio...
By Zhisheng Zhang, Xiang Li, Yixuan Zhou, Jing Peng, Guoyang Zeng, Zhiyong Wu
Dominant audio classification pipelines rely either on compact handcrafted summaries or on fixed time-frequency frontends such as log-mel representations prior to deep modeling. While highly successfu...
arXiv:2609.38887v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-time voice conversion (VC) systems commonly rely on pretrained speaker embeddings from automatic speaker verification (ASV) models. While effect...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
arXiv:2603. 27218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Music Structure Analysis (MSA) aims to uncover the high-level organization of musical pieces.
By Axel Marmoret
arXiv:2603. 23667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Echoes, a new dataset for music deepfake detection designed for training and benchmarking detectors under realistic and provider-diverse conditions.
By Octavian Pascu, Dan Oneata, Horia Cucu, Nicolas M. Muller
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