DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17130787
title: Harmonic Frontier Audio - Bagpipes - Scottish Highland Bagpipes (Preview Pack, v0.9)

description: Harmonic Frontier Audio – Bagpipes - Scottish Highland Bagpipes, Preview (v0.9)

A high-quality bagpipes dataset (Scottish highland bagpipes) — designed for AI training, music research, and creative audio projects in folk and world music.

Scottish Highland Bagpipes, a preview dataset, created by Harmonic Frontier Audio.It provides developers, researchers, and musicians with a compact reference set, demonstrating the quality and format of the full Harmonic Frontier Audio bagpipe dataset series.

 

For citation, see DOI link at bottom of this page



 

🎶 About the Scottish Highland Bagpipes

The Highland Bagpipes are the most iconic member of the bagpipe family, with a powerful, penetrating sound produced by a conical-bore chanter and three drones.They are widely used in Scottish traditional music, military and pipe band contexts, and contemporary experimental performance.This dataset captures chanter-focused recordings, with drones engaged in most takes, designed to provide training material for machine learning, sound design, and audio research.Unlike many instruments, the highland bagpipes produce a continuous sound with no rests, and the chanter naturally becomes quieter as it ascends in pitch.This continuous and dynamic quality makes them uniquely challenging — and rewarding — for audio modeling and dataset creation.

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a 🤍 on Hugging Face.It helps other researchers and developers discover the resource more easily.

 

📂 Contents

Audio Files (.wav)



Recorded at 96 kHz / 24-bit WAV format

Exported as mono

Clean recordings with no fade-ins or fade-outs (pipes are already sounding at file start/end)

High-pass filtered at ~40 Hz to remove subsonic rumble


 

Categories in this Preview





Scale Exercises



No Gracenote Scale (with and without drones)

G Gracenote Scale

E Gracenote Scale (with and without drones)





Sustained Notes



Low A

C

E

F





Strikes



B Strikes

C Strikes

E Strikes





Short Tune Snippet



"Amazing Grace"






Metadata (.csv)Includes structured fields for file name, instrument, category, content, note pitch, vibrato (true/false), BPM, mic position, channels, sample rate, bit depth, recording chain, and dataset version.



 

🎤 Recording Notes



Pipes recorded in a treated room with single mic setup:



Chanter mic (Oktava MK-012) near chanter



Levels are natural to the instrument — low notes peak louder than high notes, reflecting authentic dynamics.




 

🌈 Spectrogram Preview

Below is a spectrogram of the included short tune snippet, showing the harmonic profile of the Scottish Highland Bagpipes:





 

⚡ Usage

This preview pack is designed for:



Evaluation of Harmonic Frontier Audio format and quality

Testing workflows in ML training, sample library creation, or DSP pipelines

Demonstration for developers exploring bagpipe timbres


👉 Note: This is not a full dataset. The complete Harmonic Frontier Audio dataset for Highland Bagpipes will include:



Full ornamentation library

Sustained notes across the full range

Additional exercises and variations




 

💡 Full Dataset Availability

This is a preview pack of the Highland Bagpipes dataset.The complete dataset — including extended recordings, multiple takes, ornaments, and additional mic positions — is available for licensing.

For licensing inquiries, please contact:📩 info@harmonicfrontieraudio.com



 

📜 License

Released under CC BY-NC 4.0.



Free for non-commercial use, testing, and research.

Commercial licensing available via Harmonic Frontier Audio.

A formal rights declaration is included in this dataset bundle.




 

📧 Contact

Harmonic Frontier Audio📩 info@harmonicfrontieraudio.com🌐 https://harmonicfrontieraudio.com/



 

🔮 Future Roadmap

This preview release is the first step in the Harmonic Frontier Audio Celtic Instruments Series.Upcoming planned datasets include:



Full Scottish Highland Bagpipes dataset (expanded embellishments and articulations)

Bodhran (Irish Frame Drum)

Irish Low Whistle

Irish Flute


Over time, Harmonic Frontier Audio will also expand into additional world folk instruments, building the first dedicated catalog of folk/ethnic datasets for AI training, synthesis, and sound design.

 

🗒️ Release Notes

Version 0.9 (Sept. 2025) – Initial Preview Pack release for Scottish Highland Bagpipes.See CHANGELOG.md for detailed version history.



 

Citation

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

Pullen, B. (2025). Scottish Highland Bagpipes Dataset (Preview) [Data set]. Harmonic Frontier Audio. Zenodo.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4527-0178