Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models' Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores

arXiv:2511.20697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding complete musical scores entails integrated reasoning over pitch, rhythm, harmony, and large-scale structure, yet the ability of Large Language Models and Vision--Language Models to interpret full musical notation remains insufficiently examined. We introduce Musical Score Understanding Benchmark (MSU-Bench), a human-curated benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual (ABC notation) and visual (PDF) modalit