Abstract
Musical themes are essential elements in Western classical music. In this paper, we present the Musical Theme Dataset (MTD), a multimodal dataset inspired by “A Dictionary of Musical Themes” by Barlow and Morgenstern from 1948. For a subset of 2067 themes of the printed book, we created several digital representations of the musical themes. Beyond graphical sheet music, we provide symbolic music encodings, audio snippets of music recordings, alignments between the symbolic and audio representations, as well as detailed metadata on the composer, work, recording, and musical characteristics of the themes. In addition to the data, we also make several parsers and web-based interfaces available to access and explore the different modalities and their relations through visualizations and sonifications. These interfaces also include computational tools, bridging the gap between the original dictionary and music information retrieval (MIR) research. The dataset is of relevance for various subfields and tasks in MIR, such as cross-modal music retrieval, music alignment, optical music recognition, music transcription, and computational musicology.
Highlights
Western classical music is largely based on musical themes (Drabkin, 2001)
This paper describes a multimodal dataset, called MTD (Musical Theme Dataset), that is inspired by the original BM dictionary
We provide our custom tools for manually aligning the symbolic and audio versions to enable the users of the MTD to continue expanding the dataset
Summary
Western classical music is largely based on musical themes (Drabkin, 2001). Such a theme is a musical idea used to build a composition (or a part of it). The MTD contains audio from commercial recordings that are manually aligned to the symbolic encodings Another AMT dataset is MusicNet (Thickstun et al, 2017), which provides audio recordings and symbolic encodings of Western classical music pieces in diverse solo and chamber music instrumentations. A further related dataset is MSMD containing MIDI representations, graphical sheet music, and syn thesized audio for classical piano pieces with note-level alignments between the modalities (Dorfer et al, 2018). An essential aspect of Western classical music is the repetition and variation of thematic material throughout a musical work In musicology, it is not well defined whether a theme is only the monophonic melodic line, independent from the polyphonic context in which it occurs, or the entire polyphonic section (Drabkin, 2001).
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