Audio-to-Score Transcription using Pre-trained Features, Data Augmentation, and the New SheetSage-A2S Dataset

2026-08-06

AI Summary

This work addresses the limited focus of existing audio-to-score transcription research on classical music and the consequent lack of effective modeling for popular music. To bridge this gap, the authors introduce SheetSage-A2S, the first large-scale dataset specifically designed for popular music audio-to-score transcription. They propose an end-to-end transcription model that leverages MuQ-pretrained audio features, tailored data augmentation strategies, and a **kern-based score representation. The approach demonstrates substantially improved cross-genre generalization: it reduces the symbol error rate (SER) to 4.98% on the classical Quartets dataset—down from the previous best of 15.3%—and achieves an SER of 20.92% on SheetSage-A2S, thereby establishing the first benchmark for popular music audio-to-score transcription.

Abstract

Existing audio-to-score (A2S) systems primarily focus on classical music, and the application to popular music remains underexplored. This paper first presents the new SheetSage-A2S Dataset, which includes 61 hours of audio with \texttt{**kern} score encodings for 9,468 clips originating from 6,066 unique songs, the first of its kind to facilitate A2S research for popular music. Additionally, we improve on existing A2S approaches by using data augmentation and MuQ, a pretrained feature-extraction model for music audio, to enhance generalisation abilities and extract meaningful audio features. Results show that the proposed A2S model achieves 4.98\% symbol error rate (SER) on the Quartets collection for classical music, which significantly outperforms the 15.3\% SER from the existing state-of-the-art \cite{alfaro-contrerasTransformer2024}. Additionally, our model achieves 20.92\% SER on the SheetSage-A2S dataset for popular music, serving as a strong benchmark for future research. The dataset, model, and code are made publicly available at: https://github.com/Multimodal-Music-Research-Lab/SheetSage2Kern_model.

Problem

• Audio-to-Score
• popular music
• music transcription
• symbol error rate
• SheetSage-A2S Dataset

Innovation

• Audio-to-Score Transcription
• Pre-trained Features
• Data Augmentation
• SheetSage-A2S Dataset
• MuQ