RWC Music Database: Popular, Classical and Jazz Music Databases

This paper describes the design policy and specifications of the RWC Music Database, a music database (DB) that is available to researchers for common use and research purposes. Various commonly available DBs have been built in other research fields and have made a significant contribution to the research in those fields. The field of musical information processing, however, has lacked a commonly available music DB. We therefore built the RWC Music Database which contains four original DBs: the Popular Music Database (100 pieces), Royalty-Free Music Database (15 pieces), Classical Music Database (50 pieces), and Jazz Music Database (50 pieces). Each consists of originally-recorded music compact discs, standard MIDI files, and text files of lyrics. These DBs are now available in Japan at a cost equal to only duplication, shipping, and handling charges (virtually for free), and we plan to make them available outside Japan. We hope that our DB will encourage further advances in musical information processing research.