Challenges in managing linguistic diversity and integrating various musical modalities are faced by current music information retrieval systems. These limitations reduce their effectiveness in a global, multimodal music environment. To address these issues, we introduce CLaMP 2, a system compatible with 101 languages that supports both ABC notation (a text-based musical notation format) and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) for music information retrieval. CLaMP 2, pre-trained on 1.5 million ABC-MIDI-text triplets, includes a multilingual text encoder and a multimodal music encoder aligned via contrastive learning. By leveraging large language models, we obtain refined and consistent multilingual descriptions at scale, significantly reducing textual noise and balancing language distribution. Our experiments show that CLaMP 2 achieves state-of-the-art results in both multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities, thus establishing a new standard for inclusive and global music information retrieval.

Music source separation (MSS) shows active progress with deep learning models in recent years. Many MSS models perform separations on spectrograms by estimating bounded ratio masks and reusing the phases of the mixture. When using convolutional neural networks (CNN), weights are usually shared within a spectrogram during convolution regardless of the different patterns between frequency bands. In this study, we propose a new MSS model, channel-wise subband phase-aware ResUNet (CWS-PResUNet), to decompose signals into subbands and estimate an unbound complex ideal ratio mask (cIRM) for each source. CWS-PResUNet utilizes a channel-wise subband (CWS) feature to limit unnecessary global weights sharing on the spectrogram and reduce computational resource consumptions. The saved computational cost and memory can in turn allow for a larger architecture. On the MUSDB18HQ test set, we propose a 276-layer CWS-PResUNet and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on vocals with an 8.92 signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) score. By combining CWS-PResUNet and Demucs, our ByteMSS system ranks the 2nd on vocals score and 5th on average score in the 2021 ISMIR Music Demixing (MDX) Challenge limited training data track (leaderboard A). Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/haoheliu/2021-ISMIR-MSS-Challenge-CWS-PResUNet