Scalable Music Cover Retrieval Using Lyrics-Aligned Audio Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Affolter, Joanne, Martin, Benjamin, Epure, Elena V., Meseguer-Brocal, Gabriel, Kaplan, Frédéric
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Affolter, Joanne
Martin, Benjamin
Epure, Elena V.
Meseguer-Brocal, Gabriel
Kaplan, Frédéric
author_facet Affolter, Joanne
Martin, Benjamin
Epure, Elena V.
Meseguer-Brocal, Gabriel
Kaplan, Frédéric
contents Music Cover Retrieval, also known as Version Identification, aims to recognize distinct renditions of the same underlying musical work, a task central to catalog management, copyright enforcement, and music retrieval. State-of-the-art approaches have largely focused on harmonic and melodic features, employing increasingly complex audio pipelines designed to be invariant to musical attributes that often vary widely across covers. While effective, these methods demand substantial training time and computational resources. By contrast, lyrics constitute a strong invariant across covers, though their use has been limited by the difficulty of extracting them accurately and efficiently from polyphonic audio. Early methods relied on simple frameworks that limited downstream performance, while more recent systems deliver stronger results but require large models integrated within complex multimodal architectures. We introduce LIVI (Lyrics-Informed Version Identification), an approach that seeks to balance retrieval accuracy with computational efficiency. First, LIVI leverages supervision from state-of-the-art transcription and text embedding models during training to achieve retrieval accuracy on par with--or superior to--harmonic-based systems. Second, LIVI remains lightweight and efficient by removing the transcription step at inference, challenging the dominance of complexity-heavy pipelines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_11262
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Music Cover Retrieval Using Lyrics-Aligned Audio Embeddings
Affolter, Joanne
Martin, Benjamin
Epure, Elena V.
Meseguer-Brocal, Gabriel
Kaplan, Frédéric
Sound
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Music Cover Retrieval, also known as Version Identification, aims to recognize distinct renditions of the same underlying musical work, a task central to catalog management, copyright enforcement, and music retrieval. State-of-the-art approaches have largely focused on harmonic and melodic features, employing increasingly complex audio pipelines designed to be invariant to musical attributes that often vary widely across covers. While effective, these methods demand substantial training time and computational resources. By contrast, lyrics constitute a strong invariant across covers, though their use has been limited by the difficulty of extracting them accurately and efficiently from polyphonic audio. Early methods relied on simple frameworks that limited downstream performance, while more recent systems deliver stronger results but require large models integrated within complex multimodal architectures. We introduce LIVI (Lyrics-Informed Version Identification), an approach that seeks to balance retrieval accuracy with computational efficiency. First, LIVI leverages supervision from state-of-the-art transcription and text embedding models during training to achieve retrieval accuracy on par with--or superior to--harmonic-based systems. Second, LIVI remains lightweight and efficient by removing the transcription step at inference, challenging the dominance of complexity-heavy pipelines.
title Scalable Music Cover Retrieval Using Lyrics-Aligned Audio Embeddings
topic Sound
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11262