Abstract. Much work is focused upon music genre recognition (MGR) from audio recordings, symbolic data, and other modalities. While reviews have been written of some of this work before, no survey has been made of the approaches to evaluating approaches to MGR. This paper compiles a bibliography of work in MGR, and analyzes three aspects of evaluation: experimental designs, datasets, and figures of merit.

We propose and demonstrate a simple method to explain the figure of merit (FoM) of a music information retrieval (MIR) system evaluated in a dataset, specifically, whether the FoM comes from the system using characteristics confounded with the "ground truth" of the dataset. Akin to the controlled experiments designed to test the supposed mathematical ability of the famous horse "Clever Hans," we perform two experiments to show how three state-of-the-art MIR systems produce excellent FoM in spite of not using musical knowledge. This provides avenues for improving MIR systems, as well as their evaluation. We make available a reproducible research package so that others can apply the same method to evaluating other MIR systems.Index Terms-2-WORK system performance, 5-CONT content description and annotation, 5-SEAR multimedia search and retrieval.Bob L. Sturm (S'06-M'09) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the

Abstract-An adversary is essentially an algorithm intent on making a classification system perform in some particular way given an input, e.g., increase the probability of a false negative. Recent work builds adversaries for deep learning systems applied to image object recognition, which exploits the parameters of the system to find the minimal perturbation of the input image such that the network misclassifies it with high confidence. We adapt this approach to construct and deploy an adversary of deep learning systems applied to music content analysis. In our case, however, the input to the systems is magnitude spectral frames, which requires special care in order to produce valid input audio signals from network-derived perturbations. For two different train-test partitionings of two benchmark datasets, and two different deep architectures, we find that this adversary is very effective in defeating the resulting systems. We find the convolutional networks are more robust, however, compared with systems based on a majority vote over individually classified audio frames. Furthermore, we integrate the adversary into the training of new deep systems, but do not find that this improves their resilience against the same adversary.

A significant amount of work in automatic music genre recognition has used a dataset whose composition and integrity has never been formally analyzed. For the first time, we provide an analysis of its composition, and create a machinereadable index of artist and song titles. We also catalog numerous problems with its integrity, such as replications, mislabelings, and distortions.

The GTZAN dataset appears in at least 100 published works, and is the most-used public dataset for evaluation in machine listening research for music genre recognition (MGR). Our recent work, however, shows GTZAN has several faults (repetitions, mislabelings, and distortions), which challenge the interpretability of any result derived using it. In this article, we disprove the claims that all MGR systems are affected in the same ways by these faults, and that the performances of MGR systems in GTZAN are still meaningfully comparable since they all face the same faults. We identify and analyze the contents of GTZAN, and provide a catalog of its faults. We review how GTZAN has been used in MGR research, and find few indications that its faults have been known and considered. Finally, we rigorously study the effects of its faults on evaluating five different MGR systems. The lesson is not to banish GTZAN, but to use it with consideration of its contents.