VocalCritic

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VocalCritic: Generative Multi-modal Feedback for Singing Voice Synthesis Evaluation

Paper | Model

🚀 Accepted to NeurIPS 2025 AI for Music

An advanced multimodal audio model for comprehensive vocal and music criticism

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📖 Overview

VocalCritic is an advanced audio model designed for comprehensive vocal and music criticism. The model leverages multimodal AI capabilities to analyze audio inputs and generate professional, insightful music appraisals.

📑 Table of Contents

• Overview
• Core Contributions
• Installation
• Quick Start
• Citation

🎯 Core Contributions

Key Features

1. Multimodal Audio Understanding: VocalCritic processes raw audio inputs to extract nuanced musical elements including vocal techniques, instrumentation, arrangement, and emotional expression.

2. Professional Music Criticism: The model generates detailed, structured music appraisals that cover:

   • Vocal performance analysis (technique, expression, control)
   • Arrangement and instrumentation evaluation
   • Harmonic and structural analysis
   • Emotional interpretation and cultural context
   • Comparative analysis with reference works

3. Comprehensive Evaluation Framework: Integrated with a multi-dimensional evaluation system that assesses:

   • Factual accuracy and knowledge
   • Content completeness
   • Precision in technical analysis
   • Novelty and creative insights

Important Results

• High-Quality Analysis: The model demonstrates strong performance in generating professional-grade music criticism that balances technical expertise with accessible explanations
• Multimodal Capability: Successfully processes audio inputs directly, eliminating the need for separate transcription or feature extraction steps
• Structured Output: Produces well-organized appraisals with clear sections covering different aspects of musical analysis
• Evaluation Performance: Achieves strong scores across multiple evaluation dimensions including completeness, precision, and novelty

🔧 Installation

pip install vllm librosa torch

🚀 Quick Start

Basic Inference

The following script demonstrates how to use VocalCritic for basic audio inference:

from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams
import librosa
from typing import NamedTuple

# Initialize the model
llm = LLM(
    model="your_model_path",  # Path to VocalCritic model
    max_model_len=8192,
    max_num_seqs=5,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    limit_mm_per_prompt={
        "audio": 1,
    },
)

sampling_params = SamplingParams(temperature=0.7, max_tokens=1024)

# Prepare audio input
audio_path = "path/to/your/audio.wav"
audio_data, sr = librosa.load(audio_path, sr=None)

# Create prompt for music criticism
prompt = """<|im_start|>system
You are a professional music critic with expertise in vocal performance, arrangement, and musical analysis. Provide detailed, structured appraisals of the audio content.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
<|audio_bos|><|AUDIO|><|audio_eos|>
Please analyze this audio and provide a comprehensive music criticism covering vocal performance, arrangement, instrumentation, and emotional expression.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
"""

# Prepare inputs
inputs = {
    "prompt": prompt,
    "multi_modal_data": {
        "audio": [audio_data],
    },
}

# Generate response
outputs = llm.generate(inputs, sampling_params=sampling_params)
criticism = outputs[0].outputs[0].text

print(criticism)

Using the Inference Script

For a complete example, see inference.py:

python inference.py --model_path /path/to/vocalcritic/model --audio_path /path/to/audio.wav

Citation

If you use VocalCritic in your research, please cite:

@misc{li2025generative,
      title={Generative Multi-modal Feedback for Singing Voice Synthesis Evaluation}, 
      author={Xueyan Li and Yuxin Wang and Mengjie Jiang and Qingzi Zhu and Jing Zhang and Zoey Kim and Yazhe Niu},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2512.02523},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SD},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02523}, 
}