Audio-Language Datasets of Scenes and Events: A Survey

Corresponding paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10854210/

This repository contains various scripts used for creating the survey paper on audio-language datasets. Also, it includes useful splits to mitigate overlap between datasets. Furthermore, we provide a bash script to easily download all the data in download.sh.

We also share all the audio-dataset text files used in the paper on our HuggingFace dataset repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gijs/audio-datasets.

Script files

• clap.py: Extracts CLAP audio/text embeddings from WebDataset files.

• datasettofiles.py: Converts audio files to FLAC format with JSON metadata.

• datasets.py: Functions to load and standardize 40+ audio datasets into a common file/caption/split format.

• get_diff.py: Identifies overlapping audio files between datasets using CLAP embeddings similarity analysis.

• get_dogs.py: Checks each dataset's captions for presence of "dog" and prints first matching caption.

• laion-tarify.py: Creates tar archives from audio-text pairs with configurable batch size and data splits.

• main.py: Calculates audio and text statistics for different datasets.

• maketarutils.py: Utilities for creating tar archives of dataset files.

Visualization Scripts

• analysis.py: Performs various analyses on dataset statistics.

• barplot.py: Creates bar plots for visualizing dataset distributions.

• calcaudiosetclass_unique.py: Calculates unique classes in AudioSet dataset.

• clapevaluationheatmap.py and clapevaluationheatmap_combined.py: Generate heatmaps for CLAP embedding similarities.

• clapevaluationpca.py: Performs PCA analysis on CLAP embeddings.

• clapevaluationtsne.py and clapevaluationtsne_batchsearch.py: Performs t-SNE visualization of CLAP embeddings.

• clapevaluationumap.py: Generates GPU-accelerated UMAP plots comparing audio and text embeddings across datasets.

• count.py: Counts audio and text embeddings per dataset, including remapped LAION-Audio-630k datasets.

• heatmap_evaluation.py: Generates heatmaps for CLAP embedding similarities.

• pca_analysis.py: Analyzes correlation between dataset size and embedding variability for CLAP embeddings.

New splits

When training on one dataset, and evaluating on another dataset, the training dataset should not include the ids present in the specific file in the splits directory (based on 99\% similarity, we also will upload a 95% similarity split soon). For example, for training on AudioCaps and evaluating on FAVDBench, one should remove the audios from the AudioCaps dataset that are present in the audiocaps_in_favdbench.csv. Of course, one should be more careful when training and evaluating on datasets that share the same origin.

Citation

If you use this work in some way, please cite it as follows: @article{wijngaard2025audio, author={Wijngaard, Gijs and Formisano, Elia and Esposito, Michele and Dumontier, Michel}, journal={IEEE Access}, title={Audio-Language Datasets of Scenes and Events: A Survey}, year={2025}, volume={13}, number={}, pages={20328-20360}, doi={10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3534621} }