Graphing MusicNet

BY Yuanqi Hong

July 22, 2018

MusicNet is a collection of 330 freely-licensed classical music recordings, together with over 1 million annotated labels indicating the precise time of each note in every recording, the instrument that plays each note, and the note's position in the metrical structure of the composition.

MusicNet provides two datasets: the first is its metadata, which contains summary info of the tracks, and the second is the raw data (provided in different formats), which contains everything including the labels, and which I failed to download after a couple of tries. I (had to) start by looking at MusicNet's metadata.

0 10 20 30 40 50 compositions Faure Haydn Ravel Dvorak Cambini Brahms Schubert Mozart Bach Beethoven The Man that Rules MusicNet’s Database In MusicNet's database, Beethoven has 55 compositions, steamrolling Bach and Mozart.

What I wanted to graph: melody lines

This is an example of what I wanted to graph. The data is taken from Polyphonic Melody Extraction, a project by LabROSA.

Sample Melody Line05001000150020002500 seconds225250275300325350375 HzA Sample Melody Line