Formalizing the Problem of Music Description

The lack of a formalism for “the problem of music descrip- tion” results in, among other things: ambiguity in what problem a music description system must address, how it should be evaluated, what criteria define its success, and the paradox that a music description system can reproduce the “ground truth” of a music dataset without attending to the music it contains. To address these issues, we formal- ize the problem of music description such that all elements of an instance of it are made explicit. This can thus inform the building of a system, and how it should be evaluated in a meaningful way. We provide illustrations of this formal- ism applied to three examples drawn from the literature.