MEX: The Musical Expectation Benchmark Suite

Abstract

We propose the Musical Expectation (MEX) benchmark suite for perceptually validating computational models of musical expectation, i.e., models that estimate music information dynamics (MID) measures of perceived musical expectations, such as surprisal or uncertainty from symbolic music or musical audio. MEX collects and extends tasks for evaluating such models previously proposed in music information retrieval and cognitive sciences using standard datasets, and evaluates whether: (1) proposed MID measures decrease with repetition due to in-context learning of the computational model, (2) peaks in such measures align with boundaries of music segments, (3) pitch surprisal and uncertainty estimated from audio are consistent with those modeled in event-based symbolic music, (4) proposed MID measures can predict electrophysiological responses to music. We stress that this benchmark suite does not provide an exhaustive computational characterization of music expectation. Rather, we envision this as an active, interdisciplinary initiative, with benchmarks evolving as our understanding of the underlying perceptual processes deepens. We provide open-access code https://github.com/musicperceptmodeling/mex to estimate surprisal and uncertainty from audio using baseline models, run the tasks on standard datasets, and include utilities for running the tasks with users' own data.