Organizations: School of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · Music & Arts Learning (MALer) Lab, Sogang University, South Korea · Department of Culture Technology, KAIST, South Korea
Pansori is a traditional Korean vocal genre whose mode system (jo) is defined not by scale alone but by the entanglement of pitch collection, microtonal ornament (sigimsae), and vocal timbre. In this study, we introduce a 46-hour frame-level pansori mode annotation, expert-labeled across all five canonical batang, and evaluate four complementary input representations (mel spectrogram, F0 contour, MIDI piano roll, and a multi-cultural SSL encoder) under two split strategies designed to detect shortcut learning. Across the three well-represented modes, performance degrades by only 2.1--3.6 points of F1 when entire works are held out, indicating that the models learn mode-relevant features rather than memorizing repertoire. Per-class results further show that source separation removes the percussion cue on which changjo depends, and that generic multi-cultural pre-training fails specifically on the Ujo--Gyemyeonjo distinction. Qualitative analysis of cross-modal disagreement recovers musicologically documented phenomena and agrees with published score-based analyses of modern changjak pansori.
Computational analysis of music often relies on discrete representations, yet many musical traditions are organized around continuous pitch movement that resists segmentation into note-like units. For such traditions, the discrete units that analysis would build on are not given in advance. We address this gap by learning a vocabulary of local pitch-contour patterns directly from unlabeled audio, using a VQ-VAE that quantizes fixed-length contour segments into a finite codebook. To make the learned tokens stable across segmentation positions and small variations in timing and pitch range, we train the model with a reconstruction objective evaluated under the best alignment among a set of candidate temporal and pitch-domain transformations. Applied to Korean traditional music, the learned tokens recover information about expert-defined sigimsae categories without supervision, and in pansori individual tokens align with the two principal modes, Gyemyeonjo and Ujo, supporting their use as units for corpus-level analysis of contour-centric traditions.
We consider the conversion of musical recordings into human-readable sheet music annotated with timestamps. Such output lets a listener clearly visualize rubato (temporally expressive playing), a learner diagnose ensemble precision and timing choices against the written music, and a musicology scholar compare performance styles across recordings of the same work. We introduce (1) a prompt-conditioned encoder-decoder model, named Rubato, trained to output (2) a new textual representation for polyphonic music, named InterMo, which we designed for compatibility with sequence-to-sequence training. Our experiments demonstrate that Rubato produces timestamped piano sheet music from audio with higher notational accuracy than the best existing approaches, which are based on cascades. We find that even if the cascade is given ground-truth MIDI instead of audio, Rubato performs better, suggesting that the ceiling of existing approaches is primarily representational, not acoustic. Further, because Rubato is trained on several related tasks (with prompts), it competes with or outperforms the best single-task systems on related but simpler tasks like MIDI note grounding and beat/downbeat detection. A demo is available at https://nctamer.github.io/rubato-transcription .
Current music similarity models typically compute a single, monolithic score, entangling distinct musical dimensions like melody, rhythm, and timbre. This limits user control and interpretability, making it impossible to execute nuanced queries. We introduce MERIT, a framework for learning disentangled, factor-specific music representations tailored to these three core dimensions. To overcome the lack of isolated musical variations in real-world audio, we use a novel training strategy that uses conditional audio generation and source-separated stems to strongly encourage single-factor variation in training data. Our evaluations demonstrate strong factor-wise disentanglement. Each head responds strongly to its intended perceptual dimension while remaining near chance on the others, a representational property that holds across both the synthetic training domain and independent real-world audio.