README.md

---
title: MERIT
emoji: 🎚️
colorFrom: blue
colorTo: green
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 5.28.0
python_version: '3.12'
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
short_description: Compare melody, rhythm, and timbre similarity
---

# MERIT Music Similarity

A HARP-compatible deployment of MERIT for comparing two music clips along
three independently learned dimensions: melody, rhythm, and timbre.

The Space uses the official MERIT projection heads with the frozen
MERT-v1-330M backbone. Model files are downloaded from their official
Hugging Face repositories at pinned revisions and cached between requests.

## Inputs

- Two music audio clips
- Between 5 and 10 seconds per clip

Audio is converted to mono, resampled to 24 kHz, and padded or truncated to
10 seconds. The MERIT projection heads were trained from 10-second segments;
very short inputs are rejected because silence padding can make their scores
misleadingly high.

## Output

A JSON file containing cosine similarity scores for:

- Melody
- Rhythm
- Timbre

Scores range from -1 to 1. They are similarity measurements, not calibrated
probabilities.

## Sources

See [SOURCES.md](SOURCES.md) for upstream code, model revisions, licenses,
and the associated research papers.

## License

The MERIT code and projection heads are released under the MIT License.
The MERT-v1-330M backbone is released under CC BY-NC 4.0. This combined
deployment is therefore intended for non-commercial use.