DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17170844
title: RWC Instruments Database

description: This data repository contains a re-release of the Musical Instrument Sound Database, a component of the RWC Music Database, originally published in 2003 (Goto et al., 2003). In 2026, the dataset was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), making it available online for research purposes. Users are requested to credit the original authors and publications when using this data.


The RWC (Real World Computing) Music Database (RWC-MDB) is a copyright-cleared music database that is available to researchers as a common foundation for research. It was built by the RWC Music Database Sub-Working Group of the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP) of Japan. The Musical Instrument Sound Database (RWC-MDB-I-2001) was developed as part of the RWC Music Database to provide individually recorded sounds of musical instruments. Details on the creation process are described in the original release paper (Goto et al., 2003).

 



The Musical Instrument Sound Database covers 50 musical instruments and provides, in principle, three variations for each instrument for a total of about 150 musical-instrument performances. In this database, the following approach was taken with the aim of recording a wide variety of musical-instrument performances.





Variations (3 instrument manufacturers, 3 musicians)Each variation featured, in principle, an instrument from a different manufacturer played by a different musician. In other words, three musical-instrument manufacturers and three musicians (each a professional with an average of 17 years experience) were allotted to each musical instrument. For some musical instruments, however, we included a variation recorded with another type of musical instrument.

Playing style (instrument dependent)Many playing styles were recorded within the range possible for each instrument. Furthermore, for the percussion instruments (RWC-MDB-I-2001 No. 40 – 44), we broke down each type into specific instruments and counted them as playing styles for convenience sake (and recorded, for each of these, multiple playing styles such as normal, roll, and rim).

Pitch (total range)For each playing style of an instrument, the musician generally played individual sounds at half-tone intervals over the entire range of tones that could be produced by that instrument. For stringed instruments, the total range of sounds was recorded for each string.

Dynamics (3 dynamic levels)Each playing style of an instrument was also recorded at three levels of dynamics (forte, mezzo, piano) across the total range of that instrument.


When recording the above as files on the original DVD-ROM, one file, in principle, was taken to be a collection of individual sounds in the order of ascending pitch across the total range of the instrument; a mute interval (gap) was inserted between adjacent individual sounds (for the sake of automatic sound segmentation by mute detection). The name of a file has eight characters with the extension ``.WAV''. These eight characters consist of two digits for the musical-instrument number, one digit for the variation number, two characters for the unique symbol identifying the instrument, two characters for the unique symbol identifying the playing style, and one character for the symbol indicating dynamics.

The total number of files for storing the recording of these 50 instruments came to 3544 having a total file size of about 29.1 Gbytes and a total playback time (including mute intervals) of about 91.6 hours. In addition, about five color photographs in the JPEG format (1600 × 1200 pixels) were also taken for each individual musical instrument. These photographs were assembled into a total of 948 files (about 703.1 Mbytes).



If you use this dataset in your research, please cite the following publication:

Masataka Goto, Hiroki Hashiguchi, Takuichi Nishimura, and Ryuichi Oka:RWC Music Database: Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument Sound Database





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

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1415535
description: Contents:



01_instruments.csv: Metadata file







Inst. No.: integer identifier

Variation No.: integer identifier





Category: Instrument category





Instrument symbol: Abbreviation of the instrument





Instrument name: 





# of playing styles: Different playing styles





# of files:





Folder Name: folder name as string (prepended 0)

















02_instruments_details_en:

02_instruments_details_jp: same as above but japanese

011/: example instrument



011PFNOF.WAV

011PFNOM.WAV

011PFNOP.WAV

011PFPEF.WAV

...



...

JPG/: Photographs of the recorded instruments

xx_cover_art/: Front, back cover, and inlay of the original compact discs