A Foundation Model for Music Informatics

This paper investigates foundation models tailored for music informatics, a domain currently challenged by the scarcity of labeled data and generalization issues. To this end, we conduct an in-depth comparative study among various foundation model variants, examining key determinants such as model architectures, tokenization methods, temporal resolution, data, and model scalability. This research aims to bridge the existing knowledge gap by elucidating how these individual factors contribute to the success of foundation models in music informatics. Employing a careful evaluation framework, we assess the performance of these models across diverse downstream tasks in music information retrieval, with a particular focus on token-level and sequence-level classification. Our results reveal that our model demonstrates robust performance, surpassing existing models in specific key metrics. These findings contribute to the understanding of self-supervised learning in music informatics and pave the way for developing more effective and versatile foundation models in the field. A pretrained version of our model is publicly available to foster reproducibility and future research.