# Exploring LLMs for South Asian Music Understanding and Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05522 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05522/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07729/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15383/) (2025)
- [MuseGAN: Multi-track Sequential Generative Adversarial Networks for Symbolic Music Generation and Accompaniment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06298/) (2017)
- [YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08638/) (2025)
- [The Jazz Transformer on the Front Line: Exploring the Shortcomings of AI-composed Music through Quantitative Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01307/) (2020)
- [Museformer: Transformer with Fine- and Coarse-Grained Attention for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10349/) (2022)
- [TELeR: A General Taxonomy of LLM Prompts for Benchmarking Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11430/) (2023)
- [DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01183/) (2025)
- [MuChoMusic: Evaluating Music Understanding in Multimodal Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01337/) (2024)
- [ComposerX: Multi-Agent Symbolic Music Composition with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18081/) (2024)
- [MARBLE: Music Audio Representation Benchmark for Universal Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10548/) (2023)
- [MuPT: A Generative Symbolic Music Pretrained Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06393/) (2024)
- [SongGen: A Single Stage Auto-regressive Transformer for Text-to-Song Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13128/) (2025)
- [CMI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Music Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12285/) (2025)
- [Instruct-MusicGen: Unlocking Text-to-Music Editing for Music Language Models via Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18386/) (2024)
- [LLM-based multi-agent poetry generation in non-cooperative environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03659/) (2024)
- [SDMuse: Stochastic Differential Music Editing and Generation via Hybrid Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00222/) (2022)
- [WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04744/) (2025)
- [The Bias is in the Details: An Assessment of Cognitive Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22856/) (2025)
- [SongComposer: A Large Language Model for Lyric and Melody Generation in Song Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17645/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Evaluation Metrics for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00051/) (2025)
- [ABC-Eval: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Symbolic Music Understanding and Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23350/) (2025)
- [FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19225/) (2026)
- [Music for All: Representational Bias and Cross-Cultural Adaptability of Music Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07328/) (2025)
- [Sound and Music Biases in Deep Music Transcription Models: A Systematic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14602/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in music understanding and generation tasks. However, existing works remain confined to Western tonal traditions, offering little insight into whether current LLMs can handle structurally distinct low-resource musical traditions. We present the first systematic evaluation of LLM competence in South Asian classical music, a tradition governed by raga, tala-based melodic constraints that impose fundamentally different structural principles from Western harmony-driven music. We ground our evaluation in Hindustani classical theory and Bengali classical forms, including Rabindra and Nazrul Sangeet -- representative low-resource traditions within South Asian classical music. For music understanding evaluation, we introduce a 504-question-answer benchmark spanning raga grammar, cultural knowledge, and symbolic notation reasoning, evaluating 33 LLMs where frontier models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro achieve 85-90% accuracy, while most open-source models remain in the 23-40% range. For music generation, we design a five-level controlled prompting framework and find that even the strongest model produces stylistically faithful outputs only 40% of the time. These results reveal that structural validity and stylistic faithfulness in music generation are distinct objectives and highlight an open challenge for culturally grounded music modeling.