Saarland Music Data: MIDI-Audio Piano Music

This is an improved version of the dataset originally referred to as SMD MIDI-Audio Piano Music. For more details, please visit the website: https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/resources/MIR/SMD/midi

Saarland Music Data provides audio recordings along with perfectly synchronized MIDI files for various piano pieces. The pieces were performed by students of the Hochschule für Musik Saar on a hybrid acoustic/digital piano Yamaha Disklavier. The Disklavier allows for capturing key and pedal movements of the piano while playing. This information, which can be stored in a MIDI file, yields an accurate annotation of the corresponding audio recording in form of a symbolic description of all played musical note events. The SMD MIDI-Audio pairs constitute a valuable dataset for various music analysis tasks such as music transcription, performance analysis, music synchronization, audio alignment, or source separation. 

All performances were recorded in the studios of the Hochschule für Musik Saar, played by students of piano classes of different levels, on a Yamaha Disklavier model DCFIIISM4PRO. Using two cardioid-condenser microphones fixed over the resonating body of the piano, all performances were directly recorded into Steinberg Cubase 4. Except for trimming the beginnings and ends of the recordings, no further post-processing (filters, effects) was applied to the musical material. From each Cubase project, an audio file (44.1 kHz, stereo) as well as a synchronized standard MIDI file (SMF) were exported. Besides these files, we also provide the audio files as WAV (22.05 kHz, mono) and the MIDI files encoded as CSV files and as WAV files (22.05 kHz, mono) rendered using the Software synthesizer FluidSynth.

SMD MIDI-Audio Piano Music (V1) contains the following data:

• wav_44100_stereo: Audio file (44.1 kHz, stereo)
• wav_22050_mono: Audio file (22.05 kHz, mono)
• midi: MIDI file
• csv: Export of MIDI file into CSV format
• midi_wav_22050_mono: MIDI file rendered as audio file (22.05 kHz, mono)

If you publish results obtained using this dataset, please cite:

Meinard Müller, Verena Konz, Wolfgang Bogler, 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]