The Freesound Loop Dataset and Annotation Tool
This provides a freely redistributable dataset for researchers in music information retrieval and algorithmic composition, though it is incremental as it builds on existing community data.
The authors tackled the lack of research-suitable music loop datasets by creating the Freesound Loop Dataset (FSLD), a large-scale collection of loops with expert annotations for instrument, tempo, meter, key, and genre, and they demonstrated its utility through case studies on tempo estimation, music generation, and loop separation evaluation.
Music loops are essential ingredients in electronic music production, and there is a high demand for pre-recorded loops in a variety of styles. Several commercial and community databases have been created to meet this demand, but most are not suitable for research due to their strict licensing. We present the Freesound Loop Dataset (FSLD), a new large-scale dataset of music loops annotated by experts. The loops originate from Freesound, a community database of audio recordings released under Creative Commons licenses, so the audio in our dataset may be redistributed. The annotations include instrument, tempo, meter, key and genre tags. We describe the methodology used to assemble and annotate the data, and report on the distribution of tags in the data and inter-annotator agreement. We also present to the community an online loop annotator tool that we developed. To illustrate the usefulness of FSLD, we present short case studies on using it to estimate tempo and key, generate music tracks, and evaluate a loop separation algorithm. We anticipate that the community will find yet more uses for the data, in applications from automatic loop characterisation to algorithmic composition.