CLAP linearly encodes reverberation and loudness with cross-dataset-consistent axes
measured in 1 paperMartel et al. linearly probe real LAION-CLAP audio embeddings for four low-level acoustic attributes across five datasets [martel-etal-2026-clap-acoustic-attribute-probing] RT60 (reverberation time) is strongly, nearly linearly encoded (R^2>=0.67, up to 0.92 on White Noise/VCTK) and LUFS (loudness) reaches R^2>=0.76 [martel-etal-2026-clap-acoustic-attribute-probing] The independently-fit RT60 and LUFS probe axes are geometrically consistent across datasets (RT60 cosine up to 0.86), while the relative-pitch axis is domain-specific near the random-vector baseline [martel-etal-2026-clap-acoustic-attribute-probing] Across 8 more pretrained audio encoders, amplitude-invariant architectures specifically fail to encode LUFS, tying the failure to a known architectural property [martel-etal-2026-clap-acoustic-attribute-probing]