SongEval 🎵

A Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Aesthetic Evaluation of Complete Songs

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📖 Overview

SongEval is the first open-source, large-scale benchmark dataset designed for aesthetic evaluation of complete songs. It provides over 2,399 songs (~140 hours) annotated by 16 expert raters across five perceptual dimensions. The dataset enables research in evaluating and improving music generation systems from a human aesthetic perspective.

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🌟 Features

• 🎧 2,399 complete songs (with vocals and accompaniment)
• ⏱️ ~140 hours of high-quality audio
• 🌍 English and Chinese songs
• 🎼 9 mainstream genres
• 📝 5 aesthetic dimensions:
  • Overall Coherence
  • Memorability
  • Naturalness of Vocal Breathing and Phrasing
  • Clarity of Song Structure
  • Overall Musicality
• 📊 Ratings on a 5-point Likert scale by musically trained annotators
• 🎙️ Includes outputs from five generation models + a subset of real/bad-case samples

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📂 Dataset Structure

Each sample includes:

• audio: WAV audio of the full song
• gender: male or female
• aesthetic_scores: dict of five human-annotated scores (1–5)

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🔍 Use Cases

• Benchmarking song generation models from an aesthetic viewpoint
• Training perceptual quality predictors for song
• Exploring alignment between objective metrics and human judgments

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🧪 Evaluation Toolkit

We provide an open-source evaluation toolkit trained on SongEval to help researchers evaluate new music generation outputs:

👉 GitHub: https://github.com/ASLP-lab/SongEval

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📥 Download

You can load the dataset directly using 🤗 Datasets:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("ASLP-lab/SongEval")

🙏 Acknowledgement

This project is mainly organized by the audio, speech and language processing lab (ASLP@NPU).

We sincerely thank the Shanghai Conservatory of Music for their expert guidance on music theory, aesthetics, and annotation design. Meanwhile, we thank AISHELL to help with the orgnization of the song annotations.

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📬 Citation

If you use this toolkit or the SongEval dataset, please cite the following:

@article{yao2025songeval,
  title   = {SongEval: A Benchmark Dataset for Song Aesthetics Evaluation},
  author  = {Yao, Jixun and Ma, Guobin and Xue, Huixin and Chen, Huakang and Hao, Chunbo and Jiang, Yuepeng and Liu, Haohe and Yuan, Ruibin and Xu, Jin and Xue, Wei and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.10793},
  year={2025}
}