On the Effectiveness of Speech Self-supervised Learning for Music
Yinghao Ma Ruibin Yuan Yizhi Li Ge Zhang Xingran Chen Hanzhi Yin Chenghua Lin Emmanouil Benetos Anton Ragni Norbert Gyenge Ruibo Liu Gus Xia Roger Dannenberg Yike Guo Jie Fu
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown promising results in various speech
and natural language processing applications. However, its efficacy in music
information retrieval (MIR) still remains largely unexplored. While previous
SSL models pre-trained on music recordings may have been mostly closed-sourced,
recent speech models such as wav2vec2.0 have shown promise in music modelling.
Nevertheless, research exploring the effectiveness of applying speech SSL
models to music recordings has been limited. We explore the music adaption of
SSL with two distinctive speech-related models, data2vec1.0 and Hubert, and
refer to them as music2vec and musicHuBERT, respectively. We train $12$ SSL
models with 95M parameters under various pre-training configurations and
systematically evaluate the MIR task performances with 13 different MIR tasks.
Our findings suggest that training with music data can generally improve
performance on MIR tasks, even when models are trained using paradigms designed
for speech. However, we identify the limitations of such existing
speech-oriented designs, especially in modelling polyphonic information. Based
on the experimental results, empirical suggestions are also given for designing
future musical SSL strategies and paradigms.