Evaluating Pretrained Music Embeddings for Cross-Performance Jazz Standard Recognition

Recognizing jazz standards from audio is a challenging form of tune-level music retrieval: different performances of the same standard may vary in tempo, key, arrangement, instrumentation, improvisational content, and even whether the head melody is present. We study this problem using a curated subset of the Jazz Trio Database designed for cross-performance standard recognition. We compare a from-scratch trained Harmonic CNN baseline against frozen pretrained music representations from recent music understanding foundation models, using both supervised probing and nearest-neighbor retrieval. Our results suggest that from-scratch spectrogram models overfit strongly to training performances, while pretrained embeddings provide better top-$k$ results but are sensitive to performer identity, which can be partially reduced with a lightweight contrastive projection. Our findings motivate jazz standard recognition as a useful stress test for music representation models and as a step toward retrieval-based standard identification. Project page: https://github.com/cagries/tipofmyear.

Intrinsic Dimensionality as a Model-Free Measure of Class Imbalance

Imbalance in classification tasks is commonly quantified by the cardinalities of examples across classes. This, however, disregards the presence of redundant examples and inherent differences in the learning difficulties of classes. Alternatively, one can use complex measures such as training loss and uncertainty, which, however, depend on training a machine learning model. Our paper proposes using data Intrinsic Dimensionality (ID) as an easy-to-compute, model-free measure of imbalance that can be seamlessly incorporated into various imbalance mitigation methods. Our results across five different datasets with a diverse range of imbalance ratios show that ID consistently outperforms cardinality-based re-weighting and re-sampling techniques used in the literature. Moreover, we show that combining ID with cardinality can further improve performance. Code: https://github.com/cagries/IDIM.