TOWARDS ROBUST MUSIC TRANSCRIPTION BY MEASURING CROSS-VERSION CONSISTENCY IN WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is a central task within MIR, enabling various subsequent applications. Despite advancements thanks to deep learning, improving AMT remains challenging due to the scarcity of large, high-quality annotated datasets. Recognizing pitches in multi-instrument settings beyond solo piano is particularly difficult, as models struggle to generalize across domains due to dataset biases and overfitting. AMT research appears to have hit a glass ceiling, where further progress is difficult to achieve and to measure. To address this, we propose cross-version consistency---an annotation-free evaluation framework that assesses a model's transcription consistency across different recordings of the same musical work. We formalize this concept and systematically analyze its relationship with standard evaluation metrics on the AMT subtask of multi-pitch estimation. Our results show that cross-version consistency enables model assessment using only unlabeled multi-version datasets, making it particularly valuable in domains where annotated data is scarce but multi-version recordings are easy to obtain, such as orchestral music. Beyond this, our results indicate that cross-version consistency can also provide insights into a model's robustness, i. e., its ability to generalize to out-of-domain data.