Development of the RWC Music Database

In this paper I introduce the RWC (Real World Computing) Music Database, a copyright-cleared music database (DB) that is available to researchers as a common foundation for research. Shared DBs are common in other research fields and have made significant contributions to progress in those 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. The RWC Music Database was therefore built as the world’s first large-scale music DB compiled specifically for research purposes. It contains six original component DBs: the Popular Music Database, Royalty-Free Music Database, Classical Music Database, Jazz Music Database, Music Genre Database, and Musical Instrument Sound Database. The DB has been distributed to researchers at a nominal cost to cover only duplication, shipping, and handling charges (i.e., it is practically free), and has already been widely used.