Quantize & Factorize: A Fast Yet Effective Unsupervised Audio Representation Without Deep Learning

Foundation models have become increasingly prevalent in tackling Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. Although they can be a powerful tool for understanding music, the computation required for the training and inference of these models continues to grow as they become more complex. Specialized acceleration, such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), has become necessary for operating these models, as they are mostly based on large Deep Learning (DL) architectures. Furthermore, it is difficult for users to interpret them due to their black-box nature. In this work, we propose Quantizers and Factorizers for Music embeddings (QFM), a fast, unsupervised audio representation for music understanding backed by a wide range of rich MIR features and efficient feature learners. Experimental results show that QFM models perform within the range of results achieved by recent previous open source DL models on all evaluated tasks, with competitive results on a subset. This is surprising given the significantly smaller computational requirements of QFM models for training and inference.