Camille Noufi

Joseph Turian, Jordie Shier, Humair Raj Khan et al. · cmu

What audio embedding approach generalizes best to a wide range of downstream tasks across a variety of everyday domains without fine-tuning? The aim of the HEAR benchmark is to develop a general-purpose audio representation that provides a strong basis for learning in a wide variety of tasks and scenarios. HEAR evaluates audio representations using a benchmark suite across a variety of domains, including speech, environmental sound, and music. HEAR was launched as a NeurIPS 2021 shared challenge. In the spirit of shared exchange, each participant submitted an audio embedding model following a common API that is general-purpose, open-source, and freely available to use. Twenty-nine models by thirteen external teams were evaluated on nineteen diverse downstream tasks derived from sixteen datasets. Open evaluation code, submitted models and datasets are key contributions, enabling comprehensive and reproducible evaluation, as well as previously impossible longitudinal studies. It still remains an open question whether one single general-purpose audio representation can perform as holistically as the human ear.

Camille Noufi, Prateek Verma

In music and speech, meaning is derived at multiple levels of context. Affect, for example, can be inferred both by a short sound token and by sonic patterns over a longer temporal window such as an entire recording. In this letter, we focus on inferring meaning from this dichotomy of contexts. We show how contextual representations of short sung vocal lines can be implicitly learned from fundamental frequency ($F_0$) and thus be used as a meaningful feature space for downstream Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. We propose three self-supervised deep learning paradigms which leverage pseudotask learning of these two levels of context to produce latent representation spaces. We evaluate the usefulness of these representations by embedding unseen pitch contours into each space and conducting downstream classification tasks. Our results show that contextual representation can enhance downstream classification by as much as 15\% as compared to using traditional statistical contour features.