README.md

metadata

pretty_name: MuSP-Bench
language:
  - en
license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0
task_categories:
  - question-answering
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: test
        path: data/questions.csv
  - config_name: ablation
    data_files:
      - split: test
        path: data/ablation.csv

MuSP-Bench

MuSP-Bench is a 490-question benchmark for musical score understanding, performance listening, and combined score-performance reasoning.

Contents

• data/questions.csv: all 490 questions, accepted answers, and the response contract for each.
• data/ablation.csv: MIDI2 baseline accuracy by model and reporting subset.
• inputs/pdf/without_context/: one context-removed PDF per piece.
• inputs/images/: rendered score-page images for every piece.
• inputs/abc/: one ABC score per piece.
• inputs/abc_plus_midi/: one aligned ABC+MIDI score-performance representation per piece.
• inputs/midi_performance_event_text/: one MIDI performance-event-text file per piece.
• inputs/midi2_performance_event_text/: one MIDI2 numeric-pitch performance-event-text file per piece.
• inputs/audio/: WAV performances for 21 pieces. The three Blomstedt performances remain in the original BSED release and are linked below.

Each question has associated audio, MIDI and MIDI2 performance event text, ABC, ABC+MIDI, score images, and a metadata-removed PDF. The audio field is a relative local path for bundled recordings and an official source URL for the three externally hosted BSED recordings.

Input baselines

• Metadata supplies contextual information without musical evidence.
• ABC represents the written score as symbolic text, while Image uses rendered score pages and Audio uses the performance recording.
• MIDI-as-text (MIDI1) is a chronological performance-event list containing named pitches, attack velocities, onset times, and acoustic end times. MIDI2 replaces pitch names with MIDI note numbers.
• ABC+MIDI preserves the ABC score and aligns each written note with its performed onset, offset, velocity, and pedal state using parallel %%on, %%off, %%vel, and %%ped rows.
• Image+audio and ABC+audio pair the corresponding score representation with the recording.

Ablation

The ablation configuration compares MIDI1, which uses named pitches, with MIDI2, which replaces them with numeric MIDI note values. The numeric encoding substantially reduces overall accuracy for GPT-5.6-sol (55.88% to 29.41%) and both Qwen models, while MuseSpark remains at 34.45%.

Representation	Model	P	General (S/P)	Tonality/style (S/P)	Composer/title (S/P)	Overall
MIDI1	GPT-5.6-sol	63/106 (59.43%)	18/36 (50.00%)	37/48 (77.08%)	15/48 (31.25%)	133/238 (55.88%)
MIDI1	MuseSpark 1.2	28/106 (26.42%)	11/36 (30.56%)	32/48 (66.67%)	11/48 (22.92%)	82/238 (34.45%)
MIDI1	Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus	12/106 (11.32%)	5/36 (13.89%)	19/48 (39.58%)	0/48 (0.00%)	36/238 (15.13%)
MIDI1	Qwen3.6-Plus	11/106 (10.38%)	4/36 (11.11%)	17/48 (35.42%)	0/48 (0.00%)	32/238 (13.45%)
MIDI2	GPT-5.6-sol	34/106 (32.08%)	11/36 (30.56%)	25/48 (52.08%)	0/48 (0.00%)	70/238 (29.41%)
MIDI2	MuseSpark 1.2	28/106 (26.42%)	11/36 (30.56%)	32/48 (66.67%)	11/48 (22.92%)	82/238 (34.45%)
MIDI2	Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus	9/106 (8.49%)	3/36 (8.33%)	9/48 (18.75%)	0/48 (0.00%)	21/238 (8.82%)
MIDI2	Qwen3.6-Plus	4/106 (3.77%)	1/36 (2.78%)	9/48 (18.75%)	0/48 (0.00%)	14/238 (5.88%)

IDs and ordering

Rows are ordered by modality, composer, and piece number, then by their underlying span-specific horizon and question order.

For S/P questions, submodality is general, tonality/style, or composer/title, following the benchmark's established reporting split. It is blank for S, P, and SP questions.

Horizons

• Short: one event, up to two measures, or approximately 10 seconds.
• Mid: 3–16 measures or approximately 10–60 seconds.
• Long: more than 16 measures, a section, a whole-piece search, or a nonlocal comparison.
• Any: the question is not constrained to a particular musical span. This is used for S/P tonality/style and composer/title questions.

Modalities

• S: answer from the score.
• P: answer from the performance recording.
• SP: answer using both score and performance.
• S/P: answer from either source.

answerExample contains JSON-encoded formatting examples. Examples illustrate the requested syntax only and are not answers to the benchmark questions. answers contains the JSON-encoded list of accepted ground-truth answers.

Sources and attribution

MuSP-Bench is derived from the following source datasets. The released inputs have been selected, cropped or normalized as needed, converted into additional representations, and paired with newly authored benchmark questions and accepted answers.

• ASAP — Aligned Scores and Performances (pieces 1–18): Francesco Foscarin, Andrew McLeod, Philippe Rigaux, Florent Jacquemard, and Masahiko Sakai, ASAP: a dataset of aligned scores and performances for piano transcription, ISMIR 2020. Dataset · license
• MAESTRO v2.0.0: Curtis Hawthorne, Andriy Stasyuk, Adam Roberts, Ian Simon, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang, Sander Dieleman, Erich Elsen, Jesse Engel, and Douglas Eck, Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset, ICLR 2019. MAESTRO supplies the underlying competition recordings used by the selected ASAP performances. Dataset and citation
• PianoCoRe: Ilya Borovik, PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset, TISMIR 2026. PianoCoRe refined alignments were used where available in preparing the piano score/performance representations. Dataset, citation, and license
• BSED — Beethoven Symphony Excerpt Dataset (pieces 19–24): Hans-Ulrich Berendes, Abhirup Saha, Ben Maman, Vlora Arifi-Müller, and Meinard Müller, Beethoven Symphony Excerpt Dataset (BSED): An Evaluation Dataset for Orchestral Music Transcription, TISMIR 2026. Dataset and citation

BSED documents that its first three real-audio splits use public-domain IMSLP recordings, while its fourth split uses short excerpts from Herbert Blomstedt CD recordings that are not public domain; those excerpts are distributed by the BSED authors under European scientific quotation and citation provisions. See the source paper's ethical statement for details.

The Blomstedt audio is not redistributed in this repository. Download the official BSED archive and use these archive-internal files:

• Piece 19: 02_Audio/wav_44100/BSED-04_4_Beethoven_Op036-01_Blomstedt1978.wav
• Piece 20: 02_Audio/wav_44100/BSED-05_4_Beethoven_Op036-03_Blomstedt1978.wav
• Piece 23: 02_Audio/wav_44100/BSED-18_4_Beethoven_Op093-02_Blomstedt1978.wav

License

MuSP-Bench is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Credit the MuSP-Bench authors and the applicable source datasets above, link the license, and indicate modifications. Underlying third-party rights and applicable copyright exceptions remain unaffected.