AnimeTAB: A new guitar tablature dataset of anime and game music

TL;DR

AnimeTAB is a comprehensive guitar tablature dataset of anime and game music, including annotations and analysis tools, aimed at supporting MIR research and guitar learning.

Contribution

It introduces AnimeTAB, the first high-quality, structured guitar tablature dataset for anime and video game soundtracks, with accompanying analysis tools.

Findings

The dataset contains 412 full tracks and 547 clips with structural annotations.

Evaluation of analysis functions shows high accuracy against ground truth.

Example analysis demonstrates the dataset's utility for music and technique studies.

Abstract

While guitar tablature has become a popular topic in MIR research, there exists no such a guitar tablature dataset that focuses on the soundtracks of anime and video games, which have a surprisingly broad and growing audience among the youths. In this paper, we present AnimeTAB, a fingerstyle guitar tablature dataset in MusicXML format, which provides more high-quality guitar tablature for both researchers and guitar players. AnimeTAB contains 412 full tracks and 547 clips, the latter are annotated with musical structures (intro, verse, chorus, and bridge). An accompanying analysis toolkit, TABprocessor, is included to further facilitate its use. This includes functions for melody and bassline extraction, key detection, and chord labeling, which are implemented using rule-based algorithms. We evaluated each of these functions against a manually annotated ground truth. Finally, as an example, we performed a music and technique analysis of AnimeTAB using TABprocessor. Our data and code have been made publicly available for composers, performers, and music information retrieval (MIR) researchers alike.