On Generalist and Domain-Specific Music Classification Models and Their Impacts on Brazilian Music Genre Recognition

Deep learning has become the standard procedure to deal with Music Information Retrieval problems. This category of machine learning algorithms has achieved state-of-the-art results in several tasks, such as classification and auto-tagging. However, obtaining a good-performing model requires a significant amount of data. At the same time, most of the music datasets available lack cultural diversity. Therefore, the performance of the currently most used pre-trained models on underrepresented music genres is unknown. If music models follow the same direction that language models in Natural Language Processing, they should have poorer performance on music styles that are not present in the data used to train them. To verify this assumption, we use a well-known music model designed for auto-tagging in the task of genre recognition. We trained this model from scratch using a large general-domain dataset and two subsets specifying different domains. We empirically show that models trained on specific-domain data perform better than generalist models to classify music in the same domain, even trained with a smaller dataset. This outcome is distinctly observed in the subset that mainly contains Brazilian music, including several usually underrepresented genres.