Creating A Multi-track Classical Musical Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-quality, synchronized multi-track classical music dataset with comprehensive annotations, designed to advance multimodal music analysis and support both existing and novel MIR tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a new multi-track classical music dataset with synchronized audio-visual recordings, annotations, and benchmarks, addressing challenges in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness.

Findings

High synchronization quality demonstrated compared to existing datasets

Benchmark results for multi-pitch analysis and score-informed source separation

Baseline systems for novel multimodal tasks like visually informed pitch analysis

Abstract

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.