Can pre-trained Deep Learning models predict groove ratings?

Crossmodal correspondences between sound and taste are well established in psychology and neuroscience, but largely absent from content-based multimedia retrieval. We formalise taste-from-audio prediction as a content-based music information retrieval benchmark over a perceptually validated multi-source corpus, comparing ten frozen audio encoders from the four HEAR families under a shared multi-task regression head, with gated late-fusion as a configurable variant. In order to assess the effectiveness of the models, we compute absolute error and rank correlation. The strongest systems predict the five tastes within a macro RMSE of 0.134; on held-out real music their error is less than half a single rater's deviation from the consensus (RMSE 0.13 vs. 0.28), so the model tracks the group consensus more closely than an average human rater, and well below the previous state of the art baseline (0.219). On absolute error the encoders are statistically flat, with a single VGGish matching the best fusion, but gated late-fusion's advantage is confined to rank correlation (macro Pearson r 0.724 vs. 0.666). Operationalised as a content-based retrieval index, the predicted taste space ranks a 309-item pool far more faithfully than a CLAP-text baseline, which sits at chance; ridge probes and an audio-bandstop knockout read the strongest representations against documented sound-taste correspondences.

Music aesthetics scoring plays a critical role in applications such as dataset curation, generative model evaluation, and reward modeling for music generation. Recent approaches rely on deep neural networks trained on human-annotated ratings, but these models may exploit spurious correlations rather than capturing perceptually meaningful aesthetics. In this work, we identify a previously underexplored failure mode in music evaluation models: genre-induced shortcut learning. Through a systematic analysis of SongEval, we show that biases in training data lead to strong correlations between genre-related features and predicted scores, causing the model to use them as a proxy for aesthetics. This results in systematic overestimation of pop music and undervaluation of high-quality samples from other genres, leading to predictions that are inconsistent with human preferences. To address this issue, we propose a training objective that jointly reweights hard samples and regularizes group-level performance, encouraging the model to learn genre-invariant representations of musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method reduces genre-dependent bias and improves alignment with human preferences, as reflected by gains in both cross-genre and within-genre preference alignment.

Automatic music genre classification is a long-standing challenge in Music Information Retrieval (MIR); work on non-Western music traditions remains scarce. Nepali music encompasses culturally rich and acoustically diverse genres--from the call-and-response duets of Lok Dohori to the rhythmic poetry of Deuda and the distinctive melodies of Tamang Selo--that have not been addressed by existing classification systems. In this paper, we construct a novel dataset of approximately 8,000 labeled 30-second audio clips spanning eight Nepali music genres and conduct a systematic comparison of nine classification models across two paradigms. Five classical machine learning classifiers (Logistic Regression, SVM, KNN, Random Forest, and XGBoost) are trained on 51 hand-crafted audio features extracted via Librosa, while four deep learning architectures (CNN, RNN, parallel CNN-RNN, and sequential CNN followed by RNN) operate on Mel spectrograms of dimension 640 x 128. Our experiments reveal that the sequential Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN)--in which convolutional layers feed into an LSTM--achieves the highest accuracy of 84%, substantially outperforming both the best classical models (Logistic Regression and XGBoost, both at 71%) and all other deep architectures. We provide per-class precision, recall, F1-score, confusion matrices, and ROC analysis for every model, and offer a culturally grounded interpretation of misclassification patterns that reflects genuine overlaps in Nepal's musical traditions.