Jiawen Huang

Ruibin Yuan, Yinghao Ma, Yizhi Li et al. · deepmind, mila

In the era of extensive intersection between art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as image generation and fiction co-creation, AI for music remains relatively nascent, particularly in music understanding. This is evident in the limited work on deep music representations, the scarcity of large-scale datasets, and the absence of a universal and community-driven benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce the Music Audio Representation Benchmark for universaL Evaluation, termed MARBLE. It aims to provide a benchmark for various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks by defining a comprehensive taxonomy with four hierarchy levels, including acoustic, performance, score, and high-level description. We then establish a unified protocol based on 14 tasks on 8 public-available datasets, providing a fair and standard assessment of representations of all open-sourced pre-trained models developed on music recordings as baselines. Besides, MARBLE offers an easy-to-use, extendable, and reproducible suite for the community, with a clear statement on copyright issues on datasets. Results suggest recently proposed large-scale pre-trained musical language models perform the best in most tasks, with room for further improvement. The leaderboard and toolkit repository are published at https://marble-bm.shef.ac.uk to promote future music AI research.

Giovanni Bindi, Nils Demerlé, Rodrigo Diaz et al. · bytedance

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as deep learning are evolving very quickly bringing many changes to our everyday lives. To explore the future impact and potential of AI in the field of music and sound technologies a doctoral day was held between Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, UK) and Sciences et Technologies de la Musique et du Son (STMS, France). Prompt questions about current trends in AI and music were generated by academics from QMUL and STMS. Students from the two institutions then debated these questions. This report presents a summary of the student debates on the topics of: Data, Impact, and the Environment; Responsible Innovation and Creative Practice; Creativity and Bias; and From Tools to the Singularity. The students represent the future generation of AI and music researchers. The academics represent the incumbent establishment. The student debates reported here capture visions, dreams, concerns, uncertainties, and contentious issues for the future of AI and music as the establishment is rightfully challenged by the next generation.

Jiawen Huang, Emmanouil Benetos, Sebastian Ewert

In recent years, the accuracy of automatic lyrics alignment methods has increased considerably. Yet, many current approaches employ frameworks designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and do not exploit properties specific to music. Pitch is one important musical attribute of singing voice but it is often ignored by current systems as the lyrics content is considered independent of the pitch. In practice, however, there is a temporal correlation between the two as note starts often correlate with phoneme starts. At the same time the pitch is usually annotated with high temporal accuracy in ground truth data while the timing of lyrics is often only available at the line (or word) level. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning approach for lyrics alignment that incorporates pitch and thus can make use of a new source of highly accurate temporal information. Our results show that the accuracy of the alignment result is indeed improved by our approach. As an additional contribution, we show that integrating boundary detection in the forced-alignment algorithm reduces cross-line errors, which improves the accuracy even further.