#south-asian-music News & Analysis

Exploring LLMs for South Asian Music Understanding and Generation

Researchers conducted the first systematic evaluation of Large Language Models on South Asian classical music understanding and generation, finding that frontier models like Gemini 2.5 Pro achieve 85-90% accuracy on music comprehension but struggle with stylistically faithful generation (40% success rate). The study reveals that current LLMs handle Western musical traditions far better than structurally distinct, low-resource traditions like Hindustani and Bengali classical music.