  We consider the task of retrieving audio using free-form natural language
queries. To study this problem, which has received limited attention in the
existing literature, we introduce challenging new benchmarks for text-based
audio retrieval using text annotations sourced from the Audiocaps and Clotho
datasets. We then employ these benchmarks to establish baselines for
cross-modal audio retrieval, where we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training
on diverse audio tasks. We hope that our benchmarks will inspire further
research into cross-modal text-based audio retrieval with free-form text
queries.
