Audio Aesthetic Scores Overview

Updated 4 September 2025

Audio aesthetic scores are measures capturing perceptual, technical, and artistic qualities in audio content, facilitating evaluations in diverse domains such as music and soundscapes.
Modern models leverage deep learning architectures and detailed feature extraction (e.g., Production Quality, Complexity, Enjoyment, Usefulness) to provide multidimensional assessments.
These scores are integrated in systems like music recommendation, generative model fine-tuning, and production pipelines, aligning objective analysis with subjective human judgment.

Audio aesthetic scores are quantitative or qualitative measures that aim to capture the perceptual value, artistic merit, technical quality, and affective impact of audio content. These scores have become critical for benchmarking generative audio models, guiding music recommendation, informing production workflows, and automating large-scale quality assessment across domains including music, speech, environmental audio, and soundscapes.

1. Foundational Principles and Score Dimensions

The quantification of audio aesthetics builds upon objective signal analysis, perceptual criteria from listening tests, and multidimensional annotation frameworks. Early efforts relied on global metrics (e.g., mean opinion score, MOS), but recent approaches decompose listener judgment into several interpretable axes.

A representative structure first proposed in "Meta Audiobox Aesthetics" (Tjandra et al., 7 Feb 2025) divides audio aesthetics into four axes:

Production Quality (PQ): Technical soundness, clarity, fidelity, spectral balance, and spatialization.
Production Complexity (PC): Richness and diversity of compositional or production elements (e.g., orchestration, layers, effects).
Content Enjoyment (CE): Subjective artistic and emotional engagement, expressiveness, and creativity.
Content Usefulness (CU): Appropriateness for reuse, adaptability as source material, and functional value.

Other works, such as SongEval (Yao et al., 16 May 2025), advance parallel multi-dimensional frameworks tailored for full-length songs, adding dimensions like overall coherence, memorability, vocal phrasing naturalness, structural clarity, and musicality.

Order–complexity analysis ("An Order-Complexity Aesthetic Assessment Model" (Jin et al., 13 Feb 2024)) formalizes aesthetic value as a function of harmonic order and structured complexity, measured via domain-specific musical features including harmony, symmetry, chaos (entropy), and redundancy.

2. Feature Extraction and Model Architectures

Modern audio aesthetic assessment employs stacked deep learning pipelines optimized for multidimensional regression or classification:

Paper/Model	Feature Backbone	Predictor Type	Output Axes
Meta Audiobox Aesthetics (Tjandra et al., 7 Feb 2025)	Transformer (WavLM-inspired)	MLP per axis	PQ, PC, CE, CU
AESA-Net (Wisnu et al., 3 Sep 2025)	BEATs (Transformer SSL)	Multi-branch BLSTM	PQ, PC, CE, CU
SongEval (Yao et al., 16 May 2025)	Self-supervised + Ensemble	Regression/Ranking	5-song axes
Birkhoff O/C (Jin et al., 13 Feb 2024)	Logistic regression + manual	Linear O/C equation	Harmony, Symmetry, Chaos, Redundancy

Transformer architectures (WavLM, BEATs) encode temporal and spectral dependencies. Multiscale convolution and graph fusion modules (as in SoundSCaper (Hou et al., 9 Jun 2024)) are applied in some models to represent acoustic event granularity and contextual affect.

Feature extraction includes signal-level attributes (timbre balance, chord progression, spectral flux, autocorrelation), self-similarity (for symmetry), and information-theoretic complexity (Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov compression estimates).

3. Objective and Subjective Evaluation Metrics

Audio aesthetic models are validated against both automatic and human expert measures. Key metrics include:

Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE): For regression to annotated scores.
Correlation Coefficients: Pearson (LCC), Spearman (SRCC), and Kendall’s Tau (KTAU) assess rank and value alignment with human judgment.
Classification accuracy and F1: For categorical or ordinal prediction (e.g., human vs. AI vs. rendered audio (Jin et al., 13 Feb 2024)).
Standard music and audio metrics: Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), MuQ-MuLan similarity, word/phoneme error rates (WER/PER), mean opinion score (MOS).
Affective Quality Regression: ISO/TS 12913-3:2019 axes and semantic label aggregation for soundscape evaluation (Hou et al., 9 Jun 2024).

Some models employ buffer-based triplet loss (Wisnu et al., 3 Sep 2025) to improve representational discriminability and generalization under domain shift (e.g., synthetic vs. natural datasets).

4. Integration into Downstream Tasks

Audio aesthetic scores are incorporated in several downstream systems:

Music Recommendation: Embedding aesthetic features directly aids music selection systems (e.g., CL4SRec (Jin et al., 13 Feb 2024)), improving user-perceived relevance and enjoyment.
Generative Model Evaluation and Fine-Tuning: Scores derived from models like Meta Audiobox Aesthetics are used as reward signals for reinforcement learning fine-tuning, increasing subjective enjoyability of model outputs (Jonason et al., 23 Apr 2025). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns flow-models for lyrics-to-song generation with human preferences (Liu et al., 28 Jul 2025).
Data Filtering and Pseudo-Labeling: Automated scores facilitate quality-controlled dataset curation and large-scale pseudo-labeling.
Soundscape Annotation: Descriptive captioning fuses event, context, and affective axes, offering perceptually meaningful urban/environmental audio analysis (Hou et al., 9 Jun 2024).

5. Domain-Specific Trends, Challenges, and Comparisons

Analysis of large datasets uncovers production and genre-specific trends (Mourgela et al., 4 Dec 2024):

Mixing and Mastering: Loudness maximization increases technical quality but may introduce clipping and dynamic range compression artifacts. Mono compatibility and phase issues are more prevalent in early mixes; mastering improves these features but at risk of overprocessing.
Genre Effects: Electronic genres are more susceptible to major clipping and spectral imbalance; folk and acoustic prioritize mid/high frequencies and low compression.

Subjective evaluation studies show high alignment between multi-axis aesthetic scores and human expert ratings. Proxy models like Meta Audiobox Aesthetics correlate well with listener MOS and SongEval’s five-axis ratings, outperforming basic signal measures on full-length music (Yao et al., 16 May 2025). Over-optimization of proxy-based reward models may lead to decreased creative diversity (Jonason et al., 23 Apr 2025).

6. Limitations, Future Directions, and Open Data

Audio aesthetic models face limitations common to algorithmic assessment of subjective quality:

Annotated Dataset Scarcity: Many systems rely on synthetic or proxy targets (e.g., SongEval-based DPO (Liu et al., 28 Jul 2025)), as large-scale subjective ratings remain rare.
Domain Shift: Generalization to synthetic or out-of-domain audio requires robust representation learning and loss functions encoding perceptual similarity (Wisnu et al., 3 Sep 2025).
Receptive Field and Musical Structure: Fixed window models may not adequately represent global musical development or innovation.
Bias and Cultural Context: Proxy models may encode training set biases, affecting subjective validity across cultures and genres.

Open-source benchmarks and models are now widespread (Meta Audiobox Aesthetics, SongEval), promoting reproducible and extensible research. Future directions include expanded annotation axes, improved feature fusion, adversarial diversity protection, and integration of deep semantic representations in music and soundscape assessment.

7. Significance and Impact

Audio aesthetic scoring systems represent an overview of objective signal analysis, perceptual modeling, and data-driven deep learning. They enable robust, scalable, and multidimensional evaluation and optimization of generative models, recommenders, production pipelines, and environmental/urban sound analysis. The convergence of technical standards, annotated benchmarks, and advanced modeling architectures continues to advance the fidelity and human-relevance of computational audio aesthetics.