Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2003), pp.229-230, October 2003.

229

RWC Music Database:Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument Sound Database
Masataka Goto
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)/ “Information and Human Activity”, PRESTO, JST
IT, AIST, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568, Japan

Hiroki Hashiguchi
Mejiro University
4-31-1 Naka-Ochiai, Shinjuku-ku,
Tokyo 161-8539, Japanm.goto@aist.go.jp

hiro@mejiro.ac.jp

Takuichi Nishimura
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
CARC, AIST, 2-41-6 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0064, JapanRyuichi Oka
University of Aizu
Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima 965-8580, Japantaku@ni.aist.go.jp

oka@u-aizu.ac.jp

Abstract
This paper describes the design policy and specificationsof the RWC Music Database, a copyright-cleared music database (DB) compiled specifically for research purposes. Shared DBs are common in other research fields
and have made significant contributions to progress inthose fields. The field of music information processing,
however, has lacked a common DB of musical pieces
or a large-scale DB of musical instrument sounds. Wetherefore recently constructed the RWC Music Database
comprising four original component DBs: Popular Music Database (100 pieces), Royalty-Free Music Database(15 pieces), Classical Music Database (50 pieces), andJazz Music Database (50 pieces). In this paper we report the construction of two additional component DBs:
Music Genre Database (100 pieces) and Musical Instrument Sound Database (50 instruments). It is our hopethat our DB will make a significant contribution to futureadvances in the field of music information processing.

1 Introduction
With the aim of promoting further advances in the field of music information processing, we constructed a copyright-cleared
music DB that can be used in common by researchers (Gotoet al., 2002). This common DB will provide a benchmark enabling researchers to compare and evaluate their various systems and methods against a common standard. It can also be
used to stimulate research in corpus-oriented approaches thatuse statistical methods and learning techniques. In all cases, researchers can use this copyright-cleared DB for research publications and presentations (including publications in conference
CD-ROMs). Since copyright restrictions prevent commerciallydistributed musical pieces from being easily used in such presentations, the availability of a common DB should play an important role in promoting substantial advances in this research
field.
Various commonly available DBs have been built in other research fields such as speech and image processing since the importance and significance of such DBs have been widely recognized. The field of music information processing, however, hasPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this workfor personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided thatcopies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the firstcpage. 2003
Johns Hopkins University.

long lacked a copyright-cleared DB of musical pieces that could
be used as a common foundation for research. We therefore recently constructed a music DB — the RWC (Real World Computing) Music Database (Goto et al., 2002) — that researchers
can obtain and use freely in common for research purposes.
This music DB features four component DBs: the Popular Music Database, Royalty-Free Music Database, Classical Music
Database, and Jazz Music Database. Meanwhile, for musicalinstrument sounds, there are the McGill University Master Samples (Opolko and Wapnick, 1987) and the University of Iowa
Musical Instrument Samples released for public use, and private
collections assembled within companies (Kashino and Murase,1999). Nevertheless, there is still a need for a large-scale common DB containing the sounds of many musical instruments
played in various styles.
In this paper we report the construction of two additional component DBs, Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument
Sound Database, that follow the basic concept of the four DBs
already used in the RWC Music Database. The following sections describe the design policy and an overview of each of thetwo new DBs.

2 Design Policy
We decided to include musical instrument sounds as well asmusical pieces and took into consideration the following points
when designing these two additional DBs.
• ContentWith respect to musical pieces, we constructed a DB of music genres complementing the four DBs already in the RWCMusic Database. This Music Genre Database contains 100
musical pieces in a variety of genres. In producing thesepieces, we included as much variety as our production resource constraints allowed.
With respect to musical instrument sounds, we constructeda DB covering 50 musical instruments and, for each instrument, recorded individual sounds at half-tone intervals.
Furthermore, to provide variety in playing style, dynamics(stress), instrument manufacturers, and musicians, we mademany recordings for each type of instrument.
• Copyrights of musical pieces
To make our DB available to researchers around the world,
we had to obtain all the necessary copyrights and associatedlegal interests related to this DB. Accordingly, for some music genres (classical, marches, vocals, and some traditionalJapanese music) we used 27 public-domain pieces, and for230
Table 1: List of music CDs and DVD-ROMs for distributing the Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument Sound Database.
Content (Version)
Music Genre Database (Original Version: Mixed)
Musical Instrument Sound Database (Wave Files)

Quantity
9 CDs
12 DVDs

CD/DVD Catalog Number
RWC-MDB-G-2001-M01 ∼ M09
RWC-MDB-I-2001-W01 ∼ W12

Piece/Instrument Nos.
Nos. 1–100
Nos. 01–50

Catalog number: RWC-MDB-[Content]-[Year]-[Version][Volume No.], Content: The underlined letter, Year: Made in 2001

the others we used original pieces composed and arrangedfor this DB. All 100 musical pieces were newly performed,sung, and recorded. Note that our DB is not copyright-freeeven though it is available for free for research purposes.
• Standard MIDI files (SMFs) and lyrics text files
We prepared transcribed SMFs for all musical pieces. TheseSMFs are valuable because they can be freely used for research purposes and can also be used as effective substitutes
for scores. Song lyrics are provided as separate text files.

In producing RWC-MDB-I-2001 No. 01 “Piano”, for example, we used three pianos from three different manufacturers(Yamaha, Bösendorfer, and Steinway) and recorded, for each of
88 keys, four different playing styles (normal, staccato, pedal,and repeated playing of same sound) at three dynamic levels(forte, mezzo, and piano). In other words, we recorded a totalof 3168 (3 × 88 × 4 × 3) individual sounds for this DB item.
These sounds were assembled into 36 (3 × 4 × 3) files, eachholding 88 keys’ worth of sounds.

Table 1 lists the music compact discs (CDs) and DVD-ROMs
we prepared for distributing audio signals to researchers. Eachof the musical pieces and musical instruments has a unique“piece/instrument number” (sequential within each DB) thatshould be referred to for research use and publication (e.g.,RWC-MDB-G-2001 No. 53).

The sounds of these 50 instruments were recorded at 16 bit /44.1 kHz and stored in 3544 monaural sound files having a total
size of about 29.1 Gbytes and a total playback time (including mute intervals) of about 91.6 hours. Each file, in principle,
holds a collection of individual sounds in the order of ascending
pitch across the total range of an instrument. In addition, about
five color photographs of each individual instrument were also
taken and assembled into 948 files (about 703.1 Mbytes).

3 Music Genre Database
This DB consists of 100 musical pieces, three for each of 33
genres and one for a cappella. It is divided into 10 main categories (popular, rock, dance, jazz, Latin, classical, marches,world, vocals, and traditional Japanese music) and 33 subcategories (popular, ballads, rock, heavy metal, rap/hip-hop, house,techno, funk, soul/R&B, big band, modern Jazz, fusion, bossa
nova, samba, reggae, tango, baroque, classic, romantic, modern, brass band, blues, folk, country, gospel, African, Indian,flamenco, chanson, canzone, traditional-style Japanese popular music Enka, Japanese folk music Min’you, and ancientJapanese court music Gagaku). Note that this does not mean to
imply that all music can be categorized in this way: these categories were used simply for convenience when recording thepieces. All 100 pieces are original recordings, 73 being originalcompositions and 27 being existing public-domain pieces. Atotal of 280 people participated in their production.

4 Musical Instrument Sound Database
This DB covers 50 musical instruments and provides, in principle, three variations for each instrument. It thus comprises performances of about 150 instrument bodies. To provide a wide
variety of sounds, we took the following approach.
• Variations (3 instrument manufacturers, 3 musicians): Eachvariation featured, in principle, an instrument from a different manufacturer played by a different musician.
• Playing style (instrument dependent): Within the range possible for each instrument, we recorded many playing styles.
• Pitch (total range): For each playing style, the musician
played individual sounds at half-tone intervals over the entire
range of tones that could be produced by that instrument.
• Dynamics (3 dynamic levels): We also recorded each playing style at three levels of dynamics (forte, mezzo, piano)
spanning the total range of the instrument.

5 Conclusion
We have described the construction of the Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument Sound Database complementing
the four original DBs (Goto et al., 2002) in the RWC Music Database. The RWC Music Database built in fiscal 2000
and 2001 by the RWC Music Database Sub-Working Group(chair: Masataka Goto) in the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP) of Japan is now complete with these six component DBs. It is available to researchers around the world at anominal cost to cover only duplication, shipping, and handlingcharges (i.e., it is practically free). While it was built for general purposes related to music information processing, we hopethat our DB is a first step toward the construction of various music DBs for specialized purposes and will accelerate progress inthis field of research.
Acknowledgments
We thank everyone who has made this DB project possible. We
received considerable cooperation from Yuzuru Hiraga, Keiji
Hirata, Satoru Hayamizu, Hideki Asoh, and Katunobu Itou.
This project was supported by many parties involved in theRWC project. The C MUSIC Corporation carried out the production of all the musical pieces and the recording of the instrument sounds.
References
Goto, M., Hashiguchi, H., Nishimura, T., and Oka, R. (2002).
RWC music database: Popular, classical, and jazz music
databases. In Proc. of ISMIR 2002, pp. 287–288.
Kashino, K. and Murase, H. (1999). A sound source identification system for ensemble music based on template adaptationand music stream extraction. Speech Communication, 27(3–4):337–349.
Opolko, F. and Wapnick, J. (1987). McGill University mastersamples (CDs).