MuseCPBench: an Empirical Study of Music Editing Methods through Music Context Preservation

TL;DR

MuseCPBench is the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating music editing methods based on their ability to preserve musical context, addressing inconsistencies in prior evaluation protocols and providing insights for future improvements.

Contribution

This paper introduces MuseCPBench, the first standardized benchmark for assessing music editing methods' ability to preserve musical facets, enabling fairer and more reliable comparisons.

Findings

Current music editing methods show significant gaps in preserving musical context.

Systematic analysis reveals consistent preservation issues across methods.

Benchmark facilitates comprehensive evaluation and comparison of editing techniques.

Abstract

Music editing plays a vital role in modern music production, with applications in film, broadcasting, and game development. Recent advances in music generation models have enabled diverse editing tasks such as timbre transfer, instrument substitution, and genre transformation. However, many existing works overlook the evaluation of their ability to preserve musical facets that should remain unchanged during editing a property we define as Music Context Preservation (MCP). While some studies do consider MCP, they adopt inconsistent evaluation protocols and metrics, leading to unreliable and unfair comparisons. To address this gap, we introduce the first MCP evaluation benchmark, MuseCPBench, which covers four categories of musical facets and enables comprehensive comparisons across five representative music editing baselines. Through systematic analysis along musical facets, methods, and models, we identify consistent preservation gaps in current music editing methods and provide insightful explanations. We hope our findings offer practical guidance for developing more effective and reliable music editing strategies with strong MCP capability