Enhancing Automatic Chord Recognition through LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) encompasses a broad range of computational techniques for analyzing and understanding musical content, with recent deep learning advances driving substantial improvements. Building upon these advances, this paper explores how large language models (LLMs) can serve as an integrative bridge to connect and integrate information from multiple MIR tools, with a focus on enhancing automatic chord recognition performance. We present a novel approach that positions text-based LLMs as intelligent coordinators that process and integrate outputs from diverse state-of-the-art MIR tools-including music source separation, key detection, chord recognition, and beat tracking. Our method converts audio-derived musical information into textual representations, enabling LLMs to perform reasoning and correction specifically for chord recognition tasks. We design a 5-stage chain-of-thought framework that allows GPT-4o to systematically analyze, compare, and refine chord recognition results by leveraging music-theoretical knowledge to integrate information across different MIR components. Experimental evaluation on three datasets demonstrates consistent improvements across multiple evaluation metrics, with overall accuracy gains of 1-2.77% on the MIREX metric. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can effectively function as integrative bridges in MIR pipelines, opening new directions for multi-tool coordination in music information retrieval tasks.