The paper evaluates whether music‑text models truly capture fine‑grained musical meaning by introducing attribute‑swap perturbations that exchange properties such as timbre or order between instruments in a caption. Four contrastive models and one large audio‑language model were tested to see if they would score higher on the original caption than on the perturbed one. The results show that none of the contrastive models reliably distinguish the captions, and the audio‑language model’s advantage stems mainly from language priors, indicating that CLAP scores behave like a bag‑of‑words and fail to reflect attribute bindings.
By Yuan-Chiao Cheng, Alexander Lerch
arXiv:2607. 03806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio foundation models are widely adopted as general-purpose feature extractors, yet the internal structure of their learned representations remains insufficiently understood.
By H\'ector Martel, Joe Hennessy-Priest, Taemin Cho
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.
By Nishit Anand, Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
SonicCaps is a large-scale audio captioning dataset featuring approximately 15 million captions paired with 700,000 audio clips, created using the Qwen3-Omni multimodal language model. The dataset emphasizes diversity by generating around 24 captions per clip through structured prompt engineering and few-shot generation, covering main descriptions, rephrased variants, and semantic tags. Human evaluations rate SonicCaps higher than existing datasets, and training CLAP models on it improves audio retrieval and zero-shot classification across public and commercial benchmarks.
By Zineb Lahrichi, Marc Ferras, Ga\"el Richard, Geoffroy Peeters
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:2607. 12290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-language embedding models such as CLAP are widely evaluated on matching present sound events, but rarely on negation.
By Chun-Yi Kuan, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv:2606. 30682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in language--audio retrieval have been largely driven by contrastive dual-encoder architectures that align audio and text in a shared embedding space.
By Fengjie Lu, Chenang Jiang, Jiarui Hai, Helin Wang, Aaron Yee
arXiv:2604.18360v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Audio-text retrieval systems based on Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) achieve strong performance on traditional benchmarks; how...
By HaeJun Yoo, Yongseop Shin, Insung Lee, Myoung-Wan Koo, Du-Seong Chang
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:2511. 16757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored.
By Wei-Cheng Tseng, Xuanru Zhou, Mingyue Huo, Yiwen Shao, Hao Zhang, Dong Yu
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.
By Zhancheng Guo, Congren Dai, Shangda Wu, Jianhuai Hu, Danni Zhao, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun
arXiv:2608. 04479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has recently achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing realistic audio from natural language descriptions.
By Jinting Wang, Yuguang Yang, Shengyu Li, Yan Rong, Shan Yang, Xiaoda Yang, Li Liu