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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 08545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end neural audio models achieve high-fidelity compression and generation.