PBSCR: The Piano Bootleg Score Composer Recognition Dataset

• DOI: 10.5334/tismir.185
• Publication Date: 2024-09-14T10:52:11Z
• Authors: Arhan Jain; Alec Bunn; Austin Pham; TJ Tsai
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Sound (cs.SD); piano; composer classification; Information technology; T58.5-58.64; Computer Science - Sound; Machine Learning (cs.LG); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; dataset; sheet music; M1-5000; composer recognition; Music; Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Audio and Speech Processing

19 pages, 6 figures, to be published in Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval<br/>This article motivates, describes, and presents the PBSCR dataset for studying composer recognition of classical piano music. Our goal was to design a dataset that facilitates large-scale research on composer recognition that is suitable for modern architectures and training practices. To achieve this goal, we utilize the abundance of sheet music images and rich metadata on IMSLP, use a previously proposed feature representation called a bootleg score to encode the location of noteheads relative to staff lines, and present the data in an extremely simple format (2D binary images) to encourage rapid exploration and iteration. The dataset itself contains 40,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 9-class recognition task, 100,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 100-class recognition task, and 29,310 unlabeled variable-length bootleg score images for pretraining. The labeled data is presented in a form that mirrors MNIST images, in order to make it extremely easy to visualize, manipulate, and train models in an efficient manner. We include relevant information to connect each bootleg score image with its underlying raw sheet music image, and we scrape, organize, and compile metadata from IMSLP on all piano works to facilitate multimodal research and allow for convenient linking to other datasets. We release baseline results in a supervised and low-shot setting for future works to compare against, and we discuss open research questions that the PBSCR data is especially well suited to facilitate research on.<br/>