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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06917 |
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| _version_ | 1866911184918151168 |
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| author | Jaffe, Noah Burgoyne, John Ashley |
| author_facet | Jaffe, Noah Burgoyne, John Ashley |
| contents | Music source separation aims to extract individual sound sources (e.g., vocals, drums, guitar) from a mixed music recording. However, evaluating the quality of separated audio remains challenging, as commonly used metrics like the source-to-distortion ratio (SDR) do not always align with human perception. In this study, we conducted a large-scale listener evaluation on the MUSDB18 test set, collecting approximately 30 ratings per track from seven distinct listener groups. We compared several objective energy-ratio metrics, including legacy measures (BSSEval v4, SI-SDR variants), and embedding-based alternatives (Frechet Audio Distance using CLAP-LAION-music, EnCodec, VGGish, Wave2Vec2, and HuBERT). While SDR remains the best-performing metric for vocal estimates, our results show that the scale-invariant signal-to-artifacts ratio (SI-SAR) better predicts listener ratings for drums and bass stems. Frechet Audio Distance (FAD) computed with the CLAP-LAION-music embedding also performs competitively--achieving Kendall's tau values of 0.25 for drums and 0.19 for bass--matching or surpassing energy-based metrics for those stems. However, none of the embedding-based metrics, including CLAP, correlate positively with human perception for vocal estimates. These findings highlight the need for stem-specific evaluation strategies and suggest that no single metric reliably reflects perceptual quality across all source types. We release our raw listener ratings to support reproducibility and further research. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06917 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Musical Source Separation Bake-Off: Comparing Objective Metrics with Human Perception Jaffe, Noah Burgoyne, John Ashley Audio and Speech Processing Music source separation aims to extract individual sound sources (e.g., vocals, drums, guitar) from a mixed music recording. However, evaluating the quality of separated audio remains challenging, as commonly used metrics like the source-to-distortion ratio (SDR) do not always align with human perception. In this study, we conducted a large-scale listener evaluation on the MUSDB18 test set, collecting approximately 30 ratings per track from seven distinct listener groups. We compared several objective energy-ratio metrics, including legacy measures (BSSEval v4, SI-SDR variants), and embedding-based alternatives (Frechet Audio Distance using CLAP-LAION-music, EnCodec, VGGish, Wave2Vec2, and HuBERT). While SDR remains the best-performing metric for vocal estimates, our results show that the scale-invariant signal-to-artifacts ratio (SI-SAR) better predicts listener ratings for drums and bass stems. Frechet Audio Distance (FAD) computed with the CLAP-LAION-music embedding also performs competitively--achieving Kendall's tau values of 0.25 for drums and 0.19 for bass--matching or surpassing energy-based metrics for those stems. However, none of the embedding-based metrics, including CLAP, correlate positively with human perception for vocal estimates. These findings highlight the need for stem-specific evaluation strategies and suggest that no single metric reliably reflects perceptual quality across all source types. We release our raw listener ratings to support reproducibility and further research. |
| title | Musical Source Separation Bake-Off: Comparing Objective Metrics with Human Perception |
| topic | Audio and Speech Processing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06917 |