Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various visionlanguage tasks.However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored.We introduce Wild-Score, the first in-the-wild multimodal symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs' capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries.Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis.To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy, comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies.Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering, enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs' symbolic music understanding.Empirical benchmarking of state-ofthe-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis.We release the dataset 1 and code 2 .

Modeling temporal characteristics plays a significant role in the representation learning of audio waveform. We propose Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining (CoLLAP) to significantly extend the perception window for both the input audio (up to 5 minutes) and the language descriptions (exceeding 250 words), while enabling contrastive learning across modalities and temporal dynamics. Leveraging recent Music-LLMs to generate long-form music captions for full-length songs, augmented with musical temporal structures, we collect 51.3K audio-text pairs derived from the large-scale AudioSet training dataset, where the average audio length reaches 288 seconds. We propose a novel contrastive learning architecture that fuses language representations with structured audio representations by segmenting each song into clips and extracting their embeddings. With an attention mechanism, we capture multimodal temporal correlations, allowing the model to automatically weigh and enhance the final fusion score for improved contrastive alignment. Finally, we develop two variants of the CoLLAP model with different types of backbone language models. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple long-form music-text retrieval datasets, we demonstrate consistent performance improvement in retrieval accuracy compared with baselines. We also show the pretrained CoLLAP models can be transferred to various music information retrieval tasks, with heterogeneous long-form multimodal contexts.

Recent music large language models (music LLMs) have shown great potential in music understanding through large-scale multimodal pre-training. While some existing music LLMs have been augmented with temporally-aware music captions, music information retrieval (MIR) features conventionally do not exist in music caption datasets, thus neglected by music-LLMs. To bridge the gap between recent music LLMs and conventional music information retrieval tasks, we propose FUTGA-MIR (Fine-grained Music Understanding through Temporally-enhanced Generative Augmentation with Music Information Retrieval) to enhance the existing music LLMs by augmenting them with MIR features and aligning with human feedback. We calibrate the original positional distribution of music clips in the created pre-training synthetic music captions, conditioned on MIR features. The redistributed synthetic dataset better respects realistic MIR distributions of music and is tightly aligned with realistic music captions as well. In addition, We incorporate human-annotated music captions and MIR features from the Harmonixset dataset for an additional fine-tuning step, which addresses sim-to-real domain gaps and improves performance on realistic music tracks. We further evaluate FUTGA-MIR on several downstream tasks, including music classification, retrieval, and generation, and demonstrate the versatile capacities of FUTGA-MIR and better generation quality compared with previous music captioning models. Generated temporal-aware music descriptions are illustrated in our demonstration https://namburiamit.github.io/futga-music.github.io/.