PDMX: A Large-Scale Public Domain MusicXML Dataset for Symbolic Music Processing

TL;DR

PDMX is the largest open-source, copyright-free MusicXML dataset with over 250,000 scores, enabling research in symbolic music processing and generation while addressing data copyright issues.

Contribution

We introduce PDMX, the largest public domain symbolic music dataset with rich metadata, facilitating research and analysis in AI music generation.

Findings

High-quality subsets improve model performance

User ratings correlate with data quality

Metadata enables effective data filtering

Abstract

The recent explosion of generative AI-Music systems has raised numerous concerns over data copyright, licensing music from musicians, and the conflict between open-source AI and large prestige companies. Such issues highlight the need for publicly available, copyright-free musical data, in which there is a large shortage, particularly for symbolic music data. To alleviate this issue, we present PDMX: a large-scale open-source dataset of over 250K public domain MusicXML scores collected from the score-sharing forum MuseScore, making it the largest available copyright-free symbolic music dataset to our knowledge. PDMX additionally includes a wealth of both tag and user interaction metadata, allowing us to efficiently analyze the dataset and filter for high quality user-generated scores. Given the additional metadata afforded by our data collection process, we conduct multitrack music generation experiments evaluating how different representative subsets of PDMX lead to different behaviors in downstream models, and how user-rating statistics can be used as an effective measure of data quality. Examples can be found at https://pnlong.github.io/PDMX.demo/.