ESC-50

Introduced in ESC: Dataset for Environmental Sound Classification1 Jan 2015 archive 2025-07-28

The ESC-50 dataset is a labeled collection of 2000 environmental audio recordings suitable for benchmarking methods of environmental sound classification. It comprises 2000 5s-clips of 50 different classes across natural, human and domestic sounds, again, drawn from Freesound.org.

Source: The NIGENS General Sound Events Database Image Source: https://github.com/karolpiczak/ESC-50

Homepage Benchmarks Papers JSON

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

All 4 leaderboards whose dataset resolves to this page shown (sort by any header). "First row" is the archive's own first row at snapshot, in the archive's row order; nothing here re-ranks and metric direction is not asserted.

		First row (archive order)	Paper	Code
Audio Classification	ESC-50	OmniVec2 Top-1 Accuracy 99.1	OmniVec2 - A Novel Transformer based Network for Large...	—	29	Compare
Few-Shot Audio Classification	ESC-50	Meta-Curvature (CRNN) Top-1 Accuracy(5-Way-1-Shot) 76.17 +- 0.41	MetaAudio: A Few-Shot Audio Classification Benchmark	cheggan/metaaudio-a-few-shot-audio-classification-benchmark	10	Compare
Environmental Sound Classification	ESC-50	AudioCLIP Accuracy 97.15	AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio	iver56/audiomentations +3	1	Compare
Image Classification	ESC-50	SDGM-D Top 1 Accuracy 87	Performance of Gaussian Mixture Model Classifiers on...	cvmlmu/dgmmc	1	Compare

Papers archive 2025-07-28

27 shown of 27 papers with a leaderboard row on this dataset's benchmarks, newest first. The archive's own "papers using this dataset" list was never published, so this is the benchmark-backed subset; the archive's count for this dataset is 387. The Syntology column is from Syntology's graph (read 2026-09-24), stated per sample; it is not part of any archive number.

			Date	Samples run Syntology
M2D2: Exploring General-purpose Audio-Language Representations Beyond CLAP	2	1	28 Mar 2025	not harvested
Masked Latent Prediction and Classification for Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning	1	1	17 Feb 2025	not harvested
LHGNN: Local-Higher Order Graph Neural Networks For Audio Classification and Tagging	0	1	7 Jan 2025	not harvested
Performance of Gaussian Mixture Model Classifiers on Embedded Feature Spaces	1	1	17 Oct 2024	not harvested
M2D-CLAP: Masked Modeling Duo Meets CLAP for Learning General-purpose Audio-Language Representation	2	1	4 Jun 2024	not harvested
Masked Modeling Duo: Towards a Universal Audio Pre-training Framework	2	2	9 Apr 2024	ran 7 of 7 samples (0 unverified; 7 pointer-only for licence)
InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding	2	1	22 Mar 2024	not harvested
EAT: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Efficient Audio Transformer	1	1	7 Jan 2024	ran 13 of 17 samples (4 unverified)
OmniVec2 - A Novel Transformer based Network for Large Scale Multimodal and Multitask Learning	0	1	1 Jan 2024	not harvested
OmniVec: Learning robust representations with cross modal sharing	0	1	7 Nov 2023	not harvested
Dynamic Convolutional Neural Networks as Efficient Pre-trained Audio Models	1	1	24 Oct 2023	not harvested
MT-SLVR: Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Transformation In(Variant) Representations	1	3	29 May 2023	not harvested
BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers	4	1	18 Dec 2022	ran 3 of 18 samples (15 unverified)
Efficient Large-scale Audio Tagging via Transformer-to-CNN Knowledge Distillation	2	1	9 Nov 2022	ran 1 of 2 samples (1 unverified)
Learning Rate Curriculum	1	1	18 May 2022	not harvested
End-to-End Audio Strikes Back: Boosting Augmentations Towards An Efficient Audio Classification Network	1	3	25 Apr 2022	not harvested
MetaAudio: A Few-Shot Audio Classification Benchmark	1	7	5 Apr 2022	ran 1 of 1 samples (0 unverified; 1 pointer-only for licence)
SepTr: Separable Transformer for Audio Spectrogram Processing	1	1	17 Mar 2022	not harvested
HTS-AT: A Hierarchical Token-Semantic Audio Transformer for Sound Classification and Detection	1	1	2 Feb 2022	ran 4 of 9 samples (5 unverified)
AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio	4	1	24 Jun 2021	ran 0 of 6 samples (6 unverified)
AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer	5	1	5 Apr 2021	ran 0 of 3 samples (3 unverified)
Multi-Format Contrastive Learning of Audio Representations	0	1	11 Mar 2021	not harvested
Environmental Sound Classification on the Edge: A Pipeline for Deep Acoustic Networks on Extremely Resource-Constrained Devices	1	1	5 Mar 2021	not harvested
Audio-Visual Instance Discrimination with Cross-Modal Agreement	1	1	27 Apr 2020	not harvested
Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering	1	2	28 Nov 2019	ran 0 of 1 samples (1 unverified)
Cooperative Learning of Audio and Video Models from Self-Supervised Synchronization	0	1	30 Jun 2018	not harvested
Look, Listen and Learn	1	1	23 May 2017	not harvested

Dataset loaders archive 2025-07-28

docs.activeloop.ai/datasets/esc-50-dataset activeloopai/Hubtfpytorch

karolpiczak/ESC-50

2 loaders as listed in the archive; links are outbound and not re-checked here.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

Image Classification Audio Classification Few-Shot Audio Classification Data Augmentation Zero-shot Audio Classification Environmental Sound Classification Self-Supervised Audio Classification Environment Sound Classification Zero-Shot Environment Sound Classification

License archive 2025-07-28

CC BY-NC 3.0

Modalities archive 2025-07-28

Audio

Languages archive 2025-07-28

No language tagged.

Variants archive 2025-07-28

ESC-50

1 variant name, as the archive lists them.

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