# Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Core Music Perception Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22455/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12295/) (2023)
- [MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19168/) (2024)
- [AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07729/) (2024)
- [Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03983/) (2025)
- [MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13032/) (2025)
- [MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13992/) (2025)
- [CMI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Music Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12285/) (2025)
- [Are you really listening? Boosting Perceptual Awareness in Music-QA Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00369/) (2025)
- [Learning Audio Embeddings with User Listening Data for Content-based Music Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15389/) (2020)
- [The MUSE Benchmark: Probing Music Perception and Auditory Relational Reasoning in Audio LLMS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19055/) (2025)
- [SoundSignature: What Type of Music Do You Like?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03375/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) claim "musical understanding" via evaluations that conflate listening with score reading. We benchmark three SOTA LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen2.5-Omni) across three core music skills: Syncopation Scoring, Transposition Detection, and Chord Quality Identification. Moreover, we separate three sources of variability: (i) perceptual limitations (audio vs. MIDI inputs), (ii) exposure to examples (zero- vs. few-shot manipulations), and (iii) reasoning strategies (Standalone, CoT, LogicLM). For the latter we adapt LogicLM, a framework combining LLMs with symbolic solvers to perform structured reasoning, to music. Results reveal a clear perceptual gap: models perform near ceiling on MIDI but show accuracy drops on audio. Reasoning and few-shot prompting offer minimal gains. This is expected for MIDI, where performance reaches saturation, but more surprising for audio, where LogicLM, despite near-perfect MIDI accuracy, remains notably brittle. Among models, Gemini Pro achieves the highest performance across most conditions. Overall, current systems reason well over symbols (MIDI) but do not yet "listen" reliably from audio. Our method and dataset make the perception-reasoning boundary explicit and offer actionable guidance for building robust, audio-first music systems.