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Main Authors: Sridhar, Sripathi, Seetharaman, Prem, Nieto, Oriol, Cartwright, Mark, Salamon, Justin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13835
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author Sridhar, Sripathi
Seetharaman, Prem
Nieto, Oriol
Cartwright, Mark
Salamon, Justin
author_facet Sridhar, Sripathi
Seetharaman, Prem
Nieto, Oriol
Cartwright, Mark
Salamon, Justin
contents Sound designers search for sounds in large sound effects libraries using aspects such as sound class or visual context. However, the metadata needed for such search is often missing or incomplete, and requires significant manual effort to add. Existing solutions to automate this task by generating metadata, i.e. captioning, and search using learned embeddings, i.e. text-audio retrieval, are not trained on metadata with the structure and information pertinent to sound design. To this end we propose audiocards, structured metadata grounded in acoustic attributes and sonic descriptors, by exploiting the world knowledge of LLMs. We show that training on audiocards improves downstream text-audio retrieval, descriptive captioning, and metadata generation on professional sound effects libraries. Moreover, audiocards also improve performance on general audio captioning and retrieval over the baseline single-sentence captioning approach. We release a curated dataset of sound effects audiocards to invite further research in audio language modeling for sound design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13835
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Audiocards: Structured Metadata Improves Audio Language Models For Sound Design
Sridhar, Sripathi
Seetharaman, Prem
Nieto, Oriol
Cartwright, Mark
Salamon, Justin
Sound
Sound designers search for sounds in large sound effects libraries using aspects such as sound class or visual context. However, the metadata needed for such search is often missing or incomplete, and requires significant manual effort to add. Existing solutions to automate this task by generating metadata, i.e. captioning, and search using learned embeddings, i.e. text-audio retrieval, are not trained on metadata with the structure and information pertinent to sound design. To this end we propose audiocards, structured metadata grounded in acoustic attributes and sonic descriptors, by exploiting the world knowledge of LLMs. We show that training on audiocards improves downstream text-audio retrieval, descriptive captioning, and metadata generation on professional sound effects libraries. Moreover, audiocards also improve performance on general audio captioning and retrieval over the baseline single-sentence captioning approach. We release a curated dataset of sound effects audiocards to invite further research in audio language modeling for sound design.
title Audiocards: Structured Metadata Improves Audio Language Models For Sound Design
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13835