OpenMIIR - a public domain dataset of EEG recordings for music imagery information retrieval

Music imagery information retrieval (MIIR) systems may one day be able to recognize a song just as we think of it. As a step towards such technology, we are presenting a public domain dataset of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings taken during music perception and imagination. We acquired this data during an ongoing study that so far comprised 10 subjects listening to and imagining 12 short music fragments - each 7s-16s long - taken from well-known pieces. These stimuli were selected from different genres and systematically span several musical dimensions such as meter, tempo and the presence of lyrics. This way, various retrieval and classification scenarios can be addressed. The dataset is primarily aimed to enable music information retrieval researchers interested in these new MIIR challenges to easily test and adapt their existing approaches for music analysis like fingerprinting, beat tracking or tempo estimation on this new kind of data. We also hope that the OpenMIIR dataset will facilitate a stronger interdisciplinary collaboration between music information retrieval researchers and neuroscientists.