arXiv subjects

Ichiro Fujinaga

Publications and source records attributed to Ichiro Fujinaga.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

What Are You Listening to? Temporal Music Grounding for Audio-to-Text Large Language Models

Large audio-language models can produce fluent and musically plausible responses, yet it often remains unclear whether those responses are grounded in the audio input. We introduce temporal music grounding, a task in which a model returns one or more time spans corresponding to a queried musical note, event, or pattern. To evaluate this capability, we present MusicGroundingBench, a controlled benchmark suite built by rendering algorithmically generated piano MIDI to audio, yielding exact symbolic-to-audio alignment. The suite comprises two subsets: MGBench-3N, which evaluates note-level grounding in clips containing up to three notes, and MGBench-2B, which evaluates structured grounding and short-form music understanding in two-bar excerpts. Experiments show that temporal music grounding remains challenging for current audio-language models, whereas task-specific training yields substantial gains. We further report exploratory evidence on the relationship between grounding supervision and music understanding. These results establish MusicGroundingBench as a controlled testbed for assessing whether audio-language models ground their responses in temporally localized musical evidence.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating High-Resolution Piano Sustain Pedal Depth Estimation with Musically Informed Metrics

Evaluation for continuous piano pedal depth estimation tasks remains incomplete when relying only on conventional frame-level metrics, which overlook musically important features such as direction-change boundaries and pedal curve contours. To provide more interpretable and musically meaningful insights, we propose an evaluation framework that augments standard frame-level metrics with an action-level assessment measuring direction and timing using segments of press/hold/release states and a gesture-level analysis that evaluates contour similarity of each press-release cycle. We apply this framework to compare an audio-only baseline with two variants: one incorporating symbolic information from MIDI, and another trained in a binary-valued setting, all within a unified architecture. Results show that the MIDI-informed model significantly outperforms the others at action and gesture levels, despite modest frame-level gains. These findings demonstrate that our framework captures musically relevant improvements indiscernible by traditional metrics, offering a more practical and effective approach to evaluating pedal depth estimation models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

High-Resolution Sustain Pedal Depth Estimation from Piano Audio Across Room Acoustics

Piano sustain pedal detection has previously been approached as a binary on/off classification task, limiting its application in real-world piano performance scenarios where pedal depth significantly influences musical expression. This paper presents a novel approach for high-resolution estimation that predicts continuous pedal depth values. We introduce a Transformer-based architecture that not only matches state-of-the-art performance on the traditional binary classification task but also achieves high accuracy in continuous pedal depth estimation. Furthermore, by estimating continuous values, our model provides musically meaningful predictions for sustain pedal usage, whereas baseline models struggle to capture such nuanced expressions with their binary detection approach. Additionally, this paper investigates the influence of room acoustics on sustain pedal estimation using a synthetic dataset that includes varied acoustic conditions. We train our model with different combinations of room settings and test it in an unseen new environment using a "leave-one-out" approach. Our findings show that the two baseline models and ours are not robust to unseen room conditions. Statistical analysis further confirms that reverberation influences model predictions and introduces an overestimation bias.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Teaching LLMs Music Theory with In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Pedagogical Strategies for Machines

This study evaluates the baseline capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to learn concepts in music theory through in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting. Using carefully designed prompts (in-context learning) and step-by-step worked examples (chain-of-thought prompting), we explore how LLMs can be taught increasingly complex material and how pedagogical strategies for human learners translate to educating machines. Performance is evaluated using questions from an official Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Level 6 examination, which covers a comprehensive range of topics, including interval and chord identification, key detection, cadence classification, and metrical analysis. Additionally, we evaluate the suitability of various music encoding formats for these tasks (ABC, Humdrum, MEI, MusicXML). All experiments were run both with and without contextual prompts. Results indicate that without context, ChatGPT with MEI performs the best at 52%, while with context, Claude with MEI performs the best at 75%. Future work will further refine prompts and expand to cover more advanced music theory concepts. This research contributes to the broader understanding of teaching LLMs and has applications for educators, students, and developers of AI music tools alike.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Exploring GPT's Ability as a Judge in Music Understanding

Recent progress in text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) and their extended ability to process multi-modal sensory data have led us to explore their applicability in addressing music information retrieval (MIR) challenges. In this paper, we use a systematic prompt engineering approach for LLMs to solve MIR problems. We convert the music data to symbolic inputs and evaluate LLMs' ability in detecting annotation errors in three key MIR tasks: beat tracking, chord extraction, and key estimation. A concept augmentation method is proposed to evaluate LLMs' music reasoning consistency with the provided music concepts in the prompts. Our experiments tested the MIR capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). Results show that GPT has an error detection accuracy of 65.20%, 64.80%, and 59.72% in beat tracking, chord extraction, and key estimation tasks, respectively, all exceeding the random baseline. Moreover, we observe a positive correlation between GPT's error finding accuracy and the amount of concept information provided. The current findings based on symbolic music input provide a solid ground for future LLM-based MIR research.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Automatic staff reconstruction within SIMSSA proect

The automatic analysis of scores has been a research topic of interest for the last few decades and still is since music databases that include musical scores are currently being created to make musical content available to the public, including scores of ancient music. For the correct analysis of music elements and their interpretation, the identification of staff lines is of key importance. In this paper, a scheme to post-process the output of a previous musical object identification system is described. This system allows the reconstruction by means of detection, tracking and interpolation of the staff lines of ancient scores from the digital Salzinnes Database. The scheme developed shows a remarkable performance on the specific task it was created for.

eess.IV↗