{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/contrastive-audio-language-learning-for-music","title":"Contrastive Audio-Language Learning for Music","arxiv_id":"2208.12208","date":"2022-08-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ilaria Manco","Emmanouil Benetos","Elio Quinton","György Fazekas"],"abstract":"As one of the most intuitive interfaces known to humans, natural language has the potential to mediate many tasks that involve human-computer interaction, especially in application-focused fields like Music Information Retrieval. In this work, we explore cross-modal learning in an attempt to bridge audio and language in the music domain. To this end, we propose MusCALL, a framework for Music Contrastive Audio-Language Learning. Our approach consists of a dual-encoder architecture that learns the alignment between pairs of music audio and descriptive sentences, producing multimodal embeddings that can be used for text-to-audio and audio-to-text retrieval out-of-the-box. Thanks to this property, MusCALL can be transferred to virtually any task that can be cast as text-based retrieval. Our experiments show that our method performs significantly better than the baselines at retrieving audio that matches a textual description and, conversely, text that matches an audio query. We also demonstrate that the multimodal alignment capability of our model can be successfully extended to the zero-shot transfer scenario for genre classification and auto-tagging on two public datasets.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12208v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.12208v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"contrastive-audio-language-learning-for-music","repo_url":"https://github.com/ilaria-manco/muscall","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"audio-to-text-retrieval","task_name":"Audio to Text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"descriptive","task_name":"Descriptive"},{"task_slug":"genre-classification","task_name":"Genre classification"},{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"music-information-retrieval","task_name":"Music Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"text-retrieval","task_name":"Text Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2208.12208","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}