Creating A Multi-track Classical Musical Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications
This dataset addresses the need for multimodal resources in music information retrieval, enabling new research directions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data collection methods.
The authors introduced a multi-track classical music dataset with synchronized audio, video, and annotations to facilitate multimodal music analysis, demonstrating its high synchronization quality and benchmarking it on existing and novel MIR tasks.
We introduce a dataset for facilitating audio-visual analysis of music performances. The dataset comprises 44 simple multi-instrument classical music pieces assembled from coordinated but separately recorded performances of individual tracks. For each piece, we provide the musical score in MIDI format, the audio recordings of the individual tracks, the audio and video recording of the assembled mixture, and ground-truth annotation files including frame-level and note-level transcriptions. We describe our methodology for the creation of the dataset, particularly highlighting our approaches for addressing the challenges involved in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness. We demonstrate the high quality of synchronization achieved with our proposed approach by comparing the dataset with existing widely-used music audio datasets. We anticipate that the dataset will be useful for the development and evaluation of existing music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, as well as for novel multi-modal tasks. We benchmark two existing MIR tasks (multi-pitch analysis and score-informed source separation) on the dataset and compare with other existing music audio datasets. Additionally, we consider two novel multi-modal MIR tasks (visually informed multi-pitch analysis and polyphonic vibrato analysis) enabled by the dataset and provide evaluation measures and baseline systems for future comparisons (from our recent work). Finally, we propose several emerging research directions that the dataset enables.