MuseCPBench: an Empirical Study of Music Editing Methods through Music Context Preservation
This work addresses a benchmarking gap for researchers and practitioners in music editing, though it is incremental as it focuses on evaluation rather than new methods.
The authors tackled the lack of consistent evaluation for music editing methods' ability to preserve unchanged musical facets, introducing MuseCPBench as the first benchmark for Music Context Preservation, which revealed consistent preservation gaps across five baselines.
Music editing plays a vital role in modern music production, with applications in film, broadcasting, and game development. Recent advances in music generation models have enabled diverse editing tasks such as timbre transfer, instrument substitution, and genre transformation. However, many existing works overlook the evaluation of their ability to preserve musical facets that should remain unchanged during editing a property we define as Music Context Preservation (MCP). While some studies do consider MCP, they adopt inconsistent evaluation protocols and metrics, leading to unreliable and unfair comparisons. To address this gap, we introduce the first MCP evaluation benchmark, MuseCPBench, which covers four categories of musical facets and enables comprehensive comparisons across five representative music editing baselines. Through systematic analysis along musical facets, methods, and models, we identify consistent preservation gaps in current music editing methods and provide insightful explanations. We hope our findings offer practical guidance for developing more effective and reliable music editing strategies with strong MCP capability