The Distant Listening Corpus

This is a README file for a data repository originating from the DCML corpus initiative and serves as welcome page for both

the GitHub repo https://github.com/DCMLab/distant_listening_corpus and the corresponding

documentation page https://dcmlab.github.io/distant_listening_corpus

For information on how to obtain and use the dataset, please refer to this documentation page.

The Distant Listening Corpus (A corpus of annotated scores)

Getting the data

Data Formats

Opening Scores

Opening TSV files in a spreadsheet

Loading TSV files in Python

Version history

Questions, Suggestions, Corrections, Bug Reports

Cite as

License

Overview

ABC

bach_en_fr_suites

bach_solo

bartok_bagatelles

beethoven_piano_sonatas

c_schumann_lieder

chopin_mazurkas

corelli

couperin_clavecin

couperin_concerts

cpe_bach_keyboard

debussy_suite_bergamasque

dvorak_silhouettes

frescobaldi_fiori_musicali

grieg_lyric_pieces

handel_keyboard

jc_bach_sonatas

kleine_geistliche_konzerte

kozeluh_sonatas

liszt_pelerinage

mahler_kindertotenlieder

medtner_tales

mendelssohn_quartets

monteverdi_madrigals

mozart_piano_sonatas

pergolesi_stabat_mater

peri_euridice

pleyel_quartets

poulenc_mouvements_perpetuels

rachmaninoff_piano

ravel_piano

scarlatti_sonatas

schubert_winterreise

schulhoff_suite_dansante_en_jazz

schumann_kinderszenen

schumann_liederkreis

sweelinck_keyboard

tchaikovsky_seasons

wagner_overtures

wf_bach_sonatas

The Distant Listening Corpus (A corpus of annotated scores)

A modular infrastructure for the empirical study of (an)notated music

This corpus has been created within the DCML corpus initiative and employs the DCML harmony annotation standard.

The publication covers the following public corpora (the DOI links always point at the latest version respectively):

J.S. Bach – English and French Suites [DOI][repo][ZIP]

J.S. Bach – Solo Pieces (A corpus of annotated scores) [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Béla Bartók – 14 Bagatelles, Op. 6 [DOI][repo][ZIP]

François Couperin – L'art de toucher le clavecin [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Clara Schumann – Lieder [DOI][repo][ZIP]

François Couperin – Concerts Royaux [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – Works for Keyboard [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) – Fiori Musicali, op. 12 (1635) [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Georg Friedrich Händel – Grobschmied Variations (The Harmonious Blacksmith), HWV 430 [DOI][repo][ZIP]

J.C. Bach – Keyboard Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Heinrich Schütz – Kleine Geistliche Konzerte [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Leopold Koželuch – Piano Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Gustav Mahler – Kindertotenlieder [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Felix Mendelssohn – String Quartets [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Claudio Monteverdi – Madrigals [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – Stabat Mater (1736) [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Jacopo Peri – Euridice (1600) [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Ignaz Pleyel – String Quartets [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Francis Poulenc – Mouvements Perpetuels [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Sergei Rachmaninoff – Piano Pieces [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Maurice Ravel – Piano Pieces [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Domenico Scarlatti – Keyboard Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Franz Schubert – Winterreise [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Erwin Schulhoff – Suite dansante en jazz [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Robert Schumann – Liederkreis [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Jan Sweelinck – Organ Pieces [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Richard Wagner – Overtures [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach – Piano Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Hentschel, J., Rammos, Y., Neuwirth, M., Moss, F. C., & Rohrmeier, M. (2024). An annotated corpus of tonal piano music from the long 19th century. Empirical Musicology Review, 18(1), 84–95. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v18i1.8903

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Frédéric Chopin - Mazurkas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Claude Debussy - Suite Bergamasque [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Antonín Dvořák - Silhouettes [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Edvard Grieg - Lyric Pieces [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Franz Liszt - Années de Pèlerinage [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Nikolai Medtner - Tales [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Robert Schumann - Kinderszenen [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Pyotr Tchaikovsky - The Seasons [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Hentschel, J., Moss, F. C., Neuwirth, M., & Rohrmeier, M. A. (2021). A semi-automated workflow paradigm for the distributed creation and curation of expert annotations. Proceedings of the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR, 262–269. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.5624417

Arcangelo Corelli – Trio Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Hentschel, J., Neuwirth, M., & Rohrmeier, M. (2021). The Annotated Mozart Sonatas: Score, harmony, and cadence. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 4(1), 67–80. https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.63

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Sonatas [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Neuwirth, M., Harasim, D., Moss, F. C., & Rohrmeier, M. (2018). The Annotated Beethoven Corpus (ABC): A Dataset of Harmonic Analyses of All Beethoven String Quartets. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5(July), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00016

Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartets [DOI][repo][ZIP]

Getting the data

download individual subcorpora as ZIP files using the URLs provided above

download a Frictionless Datapackage that includes concatenations of the TSV files in the four folders (measures, notes, chords, and harmonies) and a JSON descriptor:

distant_listening_corpus.zip

distant_listening_corpus.datapackage.json

clone the repo (~2.4 GB): git clone --recursive -j12 https://github.com/DCMLab/distant_listening_corpus.git

Data Formats

Each piece in this corpus is represented by five files with identical name prefixes, each in its own folder. For example, the Prélude of J.S. Bach’s first English Suite, BWV 806, has the following files:

MS3/BWV806_01_Prelude.mscx: Uncompressed MuseScore 3.6.2 file including the music and annotation labels.

notes/BWV806_01_Prelude.notes.tsv: A table of all note heads contained in the score and their relevant features (not each of them represents an onset, some are tied together)

measures/BWV806_01_Prelude.measures.tsv: A table with relevant information about the measures in the score.

chords/BWV806_01_Prelude.chords.tsv: A table containing layer-wise unique onset positions with the musical markup (such as dynamics, articulation, lyrics, figured bass, etc.).

harmonies/BWV806_01_Prelude.harmonies.tsv: A table of the included harmony labels (including cadences and phrases) with their positions in the score.

Each TSV file comes with its own JSON descriptor that describes the meanings and datatypes of the columns ("fields") it contains, follows the Frictionless specification, and can be used to validate and correctly load the described file.

Opening Scores

After navigating to your local copy, you can open the scores in the folder MS3 with the free and open source score editor MuseScore. Please note that the scores have been edited, annotated and tested with MuseScore 3.6.2. MuseScore 4 has since been released which renders them correctly but cannot store them back in the same format.

Opening TSV files in a spreadsheet

Tab-separated value (TSV) files are like Comma-separated value (CSV) files and can be opened with most modern text editors. However, for correctly displaying the columns, you might want to use a spreadsheet or an addon for your favourite text editor. When you use a spreadsheet such as Excel, it might annoy you by interpreting fractions as dates. This can be circumvented by using Data --> From Text/CSV or the free alternative LibreOffice Calc. Other than that, TSV data can be loaded with every modern programming language.

Loading TSV files in Python

Since the TSV files contain null values, lists, fractions, and numbers that are to be treated as strings, you may want to use this code to load any TSV files related to this repository (provided you're doing it in Python). After a quick pip install -U ms3 (requires Python 3.10 or later) you'll be able to load any TSV like this:

import ms3

labels = ms3.load_tsv("harmonies/BWV806_01_Prelude.harmonies.tsv")
notes = ms3.load_tsv("notes/BWV806_01_Prelude.notes.tsv")

Version history

See the GitHub releases.

Questions, Suggestions, Corrections, Bug Reports

Please create an issue and/or feel free to fork and submit pull requests.