# Sound Check: Auditing Audio Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13114 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13114/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 155 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01963/) (2021)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, a 176B Parameter Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02001/) (2022)
- [Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03759/) (2022)
- [Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05345/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11714/) (2018)
- [FMA: A Dataset For Music Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01840/) (2016)
- [Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16863/) (2023)
- [The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15590/) (2021)
- [GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11768/) (2024)
- [LibriMix: An Open-Source Dataset for Generalizable Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11262/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [XAttnMark: Learning Robust Audio Watermarking with Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04230/) (2025)
- [Who Gets Flagged? The Pluralistic Evaluation Gap in AI Content Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13776/) (2026)
- [V.O.I.C.E (Voice, Ownership, Identity, Control, Expression): Risk Taxonomy of Synthetic Voice Generation From Empirical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24794/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative audio models are rapidly advancing in both capabilities and public utilization -- several powerful generative audio models have readily available open weights, and some tech companies have released high quality generative audio products. Yet, while prior work has enumerated many ethical issues stemming from the data on which generative visual and textual models have been trained, we have little understanding of similar issues with generative audio datasets, including those related to bias, toxicity, and intellectual property. To bridge this gap, we conducted a literature review of hundreds of audio datasets and selected seven of the most prominent to audit in more detail. We found that these datasets are biased against women, contain toxic stereotypes about marginalized communities, and contain significant amounts of copyrighted work. To enable artists to see if they are in popular audio datasets and facilitate exploration of the contents of these datasets, we developed a web tool audio datasets exploration tool at https://audio-audit.vercel.app.