CSyMR: Benchmarking Compositional Symbolic Muisc Reasoning With MIR Tool Integration

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are leveraged in symbolic music reasoning, yet existing benchmarks emphasize isolated knowledge or atomic analyses rather than the integrative compositional reasoning needed to connect musical structures. To address this, we present the Compositional Symbolic Music Reasoning Benchmark (CSyMR-Bench), a curated multiple-choice dataset of 126 questions derived from expert forums and professional examinations. Each item involves combining several atomic analyses to arrive at the final answer. Furthermore, we introduce a tool-augmented agent framework that leverages symbolic music analysis tools from the music21 library to address the challenges posed by CSyMR-Bench. Experiments validate that CSyMR-Bench poses a non-trivial challenge across both community-sourced and exam-style questions, while our tool-augmented agent consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving 5-7% absolute accuracy gains.