International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

SMD Western Music

Saarland Music Data provides audio recordings of various pieces from the Western classical music repertoire. All pieces were performed by students or staff members of the Hochschule für Musik Saar.

Copyright

If you publish results obtained using these datasets, please cite

Meinard Müller and Verena Konz and Wolfgang Bogler and
Vlora Arifi-Müller
Saarland Music Data (SMD)
In Late-Breaking and Demo Session of the 12th International
Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), 2011.
[pdf] [bib]

Saarland Music Data (SMD) by Saarland Music Data (SMD) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Naming Convention

For the audio and MIDI files, we use the following naming convention:

Composer_Work_Performer_Version.mp3 Composer_Work_Performer_Version.mid

For the variables, the following conventions are taken into account:

• Composer: Last name of composer such as Beethoven or Mozart.
• Work: Op (or similar) + 3 digits (for movements: + '-' + 2 digits) such as Op057-02, Op002No2-03, BWV123, KV012 If no work number is available, a suitable acronym is used such as CarminaBurana-05.
• Performer: The performer (orchestra, conductor, soloist) is left anonymous. Instead we use three digit identifier.
• Version: Recording date in the form yyyymmdd or possibly other information ending with -SMD.

Example: Beethoven_Op057-02_013_20090221-SMD.mp3 MP3 recording of Beethoven's piano sonata Opus 57, second movement, played by pianist 013 recorded on Feb. 21, 2009.

Database

Download Instructions

When clicking on a link to a file, your browser either will ask you to download and/or open it with your favourite audio player, or the file will be played directly in the browser (depending on your system configuration). To save the file, just right-click on the link and then click 'Save Target As' (Firefox) or 'Save Link As' (Internet Explorer). In case you want to download all files, you can use a download manager, e.g. the DownThemAll Firefox extension. On a unix-like system, you can use the tool wget to download all music files on this web page by using the following two commands: wget REPLACE_THIS_STRING_BY_URL_OF_THIS_WEBSITE -e robots=off -r -l1 -nd --no-parent -A.{mp3,mid}

Annotations and Additional Material

Key Annotations

Download : Key Annotations (CSV file)

The following key annotations have been supplied by Christof Weiss, see reference below. The CSV file contains the global key, the mode, as well as the properties of the final chord (root and mode). For fifthless final chords the term "third" is used and for a single note ending the term "unison" is used. These annotations are supplied only for 126 recordings of the SMD Western Music Dataset (only pieces with a clear global tonality were considered). In particular, works by Bellini, Berg, Debussy, Donizetti, Martin, Poulenc and Ravel as well as the first and second movement of Faure's op. 15 are not annotated. Furthermore, being work cycles that do not have a consistent global key, Op. 15 and Op. 48 by Schumann are not annotated.

Reference: Christof Weiss, Global Key Extraction from Classical Music Audio Recordings Based on the Final Chord, in Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC) 2013, Stockholm, Sweden PDF

Explanations

• key: global keynote (tonic note) of the piece / movement
• mode: global key's mode
• finalroot: root (tonic note) of the final chord
• finalmode: final chord's mode
• Db is identified with C#, and so on
• unison: empty tonic note
• fifth: empty fifth (tonic note and upper fifth)
• major third: major chord wihout fifth
• minor third: minor chord without fifth