BFDB: A dataset of British Folk melodies in ABC Format.

The British Folk Database (BFDB) is a collection of 13,835 dated folk tunes (monophonic melodies) in 'ABC' format, a text-based music notation system widely used for folk music.

These tunes were collected from online resources of ABC notation. Each tune comes with a corresponding date of collection, which is the year that the tune was originally collected and/or published. Most of these tunes come from 'tune books' which were subsequently digitised into ABC format.

This dataset may be helpful for computational musicology tasks, MIR and music evolution analysis.

File Structure

1. tune_abc_files/

This folder contains all the folk tunes in ABC format.

Each file is named using the pattern:yearOfCollection_Title.abcExample: 1740_Welch March.abc.

2. dataset.csv

This file provides metadata for each tune:

filename: Filename of each tune

year: Year that the tune was originally collected

title: Title of each tune

source: URL to where the tune was found online and where applicable, the name of the tune book that it comes from

composer/performer: Composer/Perfomer/Collector of the tune

metre: Metre of the tune

key: Musical key of the tune

tempo: Suggested performance speed

style: Genre or style of the tune (e.g., jig, reel, march)

digital_transcriber: Name of the person who transcribed the tune in ABC format

If any of these details are unavailable, the value is marked as N/A.

3. tune_pitch_rhythm_vectors.tsv

This file contains pitch and rhythm vectors extracted from each tune.

Pitch Vectors: Represent the relative intervals between successive notes.

Rhythm Vectors: Represent the relative note values, e.g. in 4/4 time:

A quarter note = 1.0

A semi-quaver = 0.5