TinySOL: an audio dataset of isolated musical notes

TinySOL === Version 6.0, February 2020. Created By --- Carmine-Emanuele Cella (1), Daniele Ghisi (1), Vincent Lostanlen (2), Fabien Lévy (3), Joshua Fineberg (4), Yan Maresz (5) (1): UC Berkeley (2): New York University (3): Columbia University (4): Boston University (5): Conservatoire de Paris Description --- TinySOL is a dataset of 2913 samples, each containing a single musical note from one of 14 different instruments: Bass Tuba French Horn Trombone Trumpet in C Accordion Contrabass Violin Viola Violoncello Bassoon Clarinet in B-flat Flute Oboe Alto Saxophone These sounds were originally recorded at Ircam in Paris (France) between 1996 and 1999, as part of a larger project named Studio On Line (SOL). Although SOL contains many combinations of mutes and extended playing techniques, TinySOL purely consists of sounds played in the so-called "ordinary" style, and in absence of mute. TinySOL can be used for creative purposes insofar at the use complies with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (see below). TinySOL can be used for education and research purposes. In particular, it can be employed as a dataset for training and/or evaluating music information retrieval (MIR) systems, for tasks such as instrument recognition or fundamental frequency estimation. For this purpose, we provide an official 5-fold split of TinySOL. This split has been carefully balanced in terms of instrumentation, pitch range, and dynamics. For the sake of research reproducibility, we encourage users of TinySOL to adopt this split and report their results in terms of average performance across folds. Data Files --- TinySOL contains 2913 audio clips as WAV files, sampled at 44.1 kHz, with a single channel (mono), at a bit depth of 16. This is equivalent to the audio quality of a compact disc. Audio clips vary in duration between two and ten seconds. Every audio file has a file path of the form: / /ordinario/ -ord- - - - .wav where: corresponds to the instrument family: "Brass", "Keyboards" (includes accordion), "Strings", and "Winds" (i.e., woodwinds). is the full name of the instrument. "ordinario" denotes the ordinary playing technique. This is in contrast with the rest of the SOL dataset, which also encompasses extended playing techniques. is the abbreviation of the instrument. "ord" is the abbreviation of "ordinario". denotes the pitch of the musical note. This pitch is encoded in the American standard pitch notation: pitch class (C means "do") followed by pi