Introduction of the Real World Computing music database

Abstract

This paper introduces the RWC (Real World Computing) Music Database, a copyright-cleared music database that is available to researchers as a common foundation for research. Shared databases are common in other research fields and have contributed importantly to progress in those fields. The field of music information processing, however, has lacked a common database of musical pieces and a large-scale database of musical instrument sounds. The RWC Music Database was therefore built in fiscal 2000 and 2001 as the world’s first large-scale music database compiled specifically for research purposes. It contains six original collections: the Popular Music Database (100 pieces), Royalty-Free Music Database (15 pieces), Classical Music Database (50 pieces), Jazz Music Database (50 pieces), Music Genre Database (100 pieces), and Musical Instrument Sound Database (50 instruments). To address copyright issues, all 315 musical pieces were originally composed, arranged, or performed, and all instrumental sounds were originally recorded. The database has already been distributed to more than 200 research groups and is widely used. In addition, a continuous effort has been undertaken to manually annotate a set of music-scene descriptions for the musical pieces, called AIST Annotation, which consists of the beat structure, melody line, and chorus sections.