Music Generation Evaluation

Overview

The field asks whether generated music sounds good, preserves musical structure, and follows instructions about attributes such as genre, rhythm, harmony, and emotion. Approaches combine expert and listener studies with acoustic or symbolic diagnostics, embedding-based similarity metrics, and learned quality or preference models. Benchmarks increasingly test specific capabilities and failure modes, including counterfactual prompt following, multi-track synchronization, song-level quality, and robustness to changed prompts or audio. A central challenge is ensuring that automatic scores reflect human judgments and musical meaning across genres and settings, rather than rewarding superficial similarity or broad quality alone.

Latest papers

CardsList

39 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Does Notation Matter? MusicXML Tokenisation for Symbolic Music Generation and Understanding

    Oct 25, 2026Andrea Poltronieri, Matteo Spanio, Simone Chieppa +2Symbolic Music GenerationTokenization in Language Models

  2. MQAScore: Fine-Grained Text-Music Alignment Evaluation via Large Audio Language Model

    Oct 22, 2026Wei-Jaw Lee, Chun-Ping Wang, Xuanjun Chen +1Audio-Text AlignmentAutomated Evaluation

  3. From Individual Songs to Music Corpora: Evaluating Explainable Harmonic Decision-Making on HookTheory

    Oct 14, 2026Josef Pavlíček, Martin PelikánMusic GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  4. MUSEBENCH: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Music Detection and Artifact Analysis

    Oct 14, 2026Yi Chen Liu, Syed Irfan Ali Meerza, Jiawei Yu +3AI-Generated Music DetectionAudio Deepfake Detection

  5. PAG-Agent: Zero-Shot Personalized Music Album Generation via Aesthetic Profile Distillation

    Oct 10, 2026Yifeng Mao, Ziye Wang, Yutong Shen +2Music GenerationUser Preference Modeling

  6. What Do Audio-Language Judges of Generated Music Listen For? Four Probes with Controls from Expert Ratings

    Oct 9, 2026Mateusz Modrzejewski, Tomasz RadzikowskiAudio-Language Model EvaluationLLM-as-a-Judge

  7. MIRA: A Musical Intent Refinement Agent for Aligning Text-to-Music Generation with User Intent

    Oct 7, 2026Zekai Liu, Zhilin Wang, Xuzheng He +2Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  8. Tracing Inputs, Verifying Outputs: Validating Attribution in Music Generation

    Oct 7, 2026Taejun Kim, Wonil Kim, Jongmin Jung +10Music Generation Evaluation

  9. Sobolev Norms in Neural Embeddings Measure Audio Morphing Regularity

    Oct 6, 2026Théo Chasle Cauchy, Modan Tailleur, Barbara Pascal +2Music Generation Evaluation

  10. Adapting a Latent Audio Diffusion Model to Historical Guqin Recordings: A Listening-Driven Case Study

    Oct 5, 2026Huanchen CaiText-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  11. Do Music Generative Models Understand Musical Qualities? Automatic Music Evaluation with Model-Intrinsic Signals

    Sep 29, 2026Xiaosha Li, Chun Liu, Ziyu WangMusic Generation EvaluationAutomated Evaluation

  12. From Human Narrative to Harmonic Structure: A Human-Centered Investigation of Algorithmic Music Generation through the Chord Wheel Diagram

    Sep 28, 2026Josef Pavlíček, Petra Pavlíčková, Irena ŠtrausováMusic Generation EvaluationSymbolic Music Generation

  13. Don't CLAP: Are Music-Text Models Bag-of-Words?

    Sep 24, 2026Yuan-Chiao Cheng, Alexander LerchMusic Generation EvaluationAudio-Language Model Evaluation

  14. Do Language Models Need Music Supervision? Verifiable Rewards for Multi-Constraint Symbolic Music Generation

    Sep 20, 2026Haoyue Liu, Xiaoying TangMusic Generation EvaluationControllable Music Generation

  15. TTM-Bench: A Framework for Text-to-Music System Performance Benchmarking

    Sep 16, 2026Giorgia Adorni, Michela Papandrea, Battista Rimoldi +1Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  16. On the Human and Computer Alignment of Attribute-Based Music Matches

    Sep 1, 2026Roser Batlle-Roca, Woosung Choi, Joan Serrà +5Music Generation EvaluationMusic Information Retrieval

  17. MusGU+: Toward a Musician-Centered Evaluation Framework and Discovery Tool for Generative Music AI

    Aug 31, 2026Laura Ibáñez-Martínez, Roser Batlle-Roca, Xavier Serra +1Music Generation EvaluationControllable Music Generation

  18. How Well Do Generative Music Models Follow Emotion Conditioning?

    Aug 30, 2026Morteza HeydariText-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  19. MuseCritic: Learning Multi-Aspect Song Rewards through Natural-Language Aesthetic Critiques

    Aug 12, 2026Jiabao Zhuang, Changhao Jiang, Hanchen Wang +11Music Generation EvaluationReward Modeling

  20. InvFlowFD: Reference-Free and Background-Set-Free Perceptual Music Quality Metric with Flow Matching Inversion

    Aug 4, 2026Alon Ziv, Harel Pogoda, Yossi AdiMusic Generation EvaluationMusic Generation

  21. Agogic: Performance-Timed Music Tokens for LLM-Native Text-to-Symbolic-Music Generation

    Aug 4, 2026Junhao Chen, Mingjin Chen, Jingjia Mao +12Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  22. Predicting Timbre Traits for Interpretable Assessment of Musical Sound Synthesizers

    Jun 29, 2026Théo Chasle Cauchy, Modan Tailleur, Lindsey Reymore +2Music Generation EvaluationMusic Information Retrieval

  23. TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

    Jun 15, 2026Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia +5Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  24. DeRA-MOS: Optimizing Text-to-Music Evaluation via Decoupled Listwise Ranking and Modality Alignment

    Jun 8, 2026Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang +1Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation

  25. Can LLMs understand LilyPond? A benchmark for symbolic music generation and understanding

    Jun 7, 2026Matteo Spanio, Mohammad Torabi, Andrea Poltronieri +1Music Generation EvaluationLLM Evaluation

  26. Exploring LLMs for South Asian Music Understanding and Generation

    Jun 3, 2026Faria Binte Kader, Mohtasim Hadi Rafi, Shah Wasif Sajjad +1Music Generation EvaluationLLM Evaluation

  27. Academic Text-to-Music Grand Challenge: Datasets, Baselines, and Evaluation Methods

    May 20, 2026Fang-Chih Hsieh, Wei-Jaw Lee, Chun-Ping Wang +3Text-to-Music GenerationMusic Generation Evaluation