Towards explainable and interpretable musical difficulty estimation: a parameter-efficient approach

Ramoneda, Pedro; Eremenko, Vsevolod; D’Hooge, Alexandre; Parada-Cabaleiro, Emilia; Serra, Xavier

Towards explainable and interpretable musical difficulty estimation: a parameter-efficient approach

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Citation

Ramoneda P, Eremenko VE, D'Hooge A, Parada-Cabaleiro E, Serra X. Towards explainable and interpretable musical difficulty estimation: a parameter-efficient approach. In: Kaneshiro B, Mysore G, Nieto O, Donahue C, Huang CZA, Lee JH, McFee B, McCallum M, editors. Proceedings of the 25th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR2024); 2024 November 10-14; San Francisco, USA. p. 520-8. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14877388

Abstract

Estimating music piece difficulty is important for organizing educational music collections. This process could be partially automatized to facilitate the educator’s role. Nevertheless, the decisions performed by prevalent deeplearning models are hardly understandable, which may impair the acceptance of such a technology in music education curricula. Our work employs explainable descriptors for difficulty estimation in symbolic music representations. Furthermore, through a novel parameter-efficient white-box model, we outperform previous efforts while delivering interpretable results. These comprehensible outcomes emulate the functionality of a rubric, a tool widely used in music education. Our approach, evaluated in piano repertoire categorized in 9 classes, achieved 41.4% accuracy independently, with a mean squared error (MSE) of 1.7, showing precise difficulty estimation. Through our baseline, we illustrate how building on top of past research can offer alternatives for music difficulty assessment which are explainable and interpretable. With this, we aim to promote a more effective communication between the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community and the music education one.