In this project we have curated 28 stereo recordings of traditional Scandinavian fiddle tunes with accompanying foot-tapping, which is standard performance practice within these musical styles. Its corpora contains not only the mixed signals, but also the two isolated instrumental tracks that can be used to train supervised models for source separation.

• The fiddle (or violin) track (harmonic);
• The foot-tapping track (percussive).

Moreover, foot-tapping in performance of fiddle music has not been systematically studied yet, even though it very often appears as an integral part of the musical expression in Scandinavian fiddle music as a percussive accompaniment. Hence, apart from contributing to the music source separation community, it is expected that Tap & Fiddle can also be used by researchers and enthusiasts working with analysis of fiddle music as well as studies of metrical expression in music in general.

The dataset is divided into a training set with 23 files and a test set with 5. In order to facilitate comparison among the research community, it is recommended that supervised approaches be trained on the provided train set and tested on the test set.

Audio and Repertoire Characteristics

The set contains recordings of different dance types, including Norwegian Halling music, with straight single and double tapping as well as Swedish polska tunes, where tapping is considerably scarcer with tapping on beat 1 and 3 in 3-beat time being the most common way to tap.

The sound of the foot-tapping ranges from more soft foot-tapping produced by a sock-covered foot, to sharp, distinct and loud foot-tapping produced by shoes with hard heels on parquet. In addition, the loudness of the foot-tapping regardless of sound source in relation to the fiddle is varied between and within recordings.

It is also important to note that some of the recordings in the dataset are variations of the same Scandinavian fiddle tune. Those recordings are versions containing different acoustic conditions and audio characteristics for the foot-tapping and/or for the violin sound within the same tune.

Recording Methodology

Each isolated signal was recorded by one fiddle player in a natural 30 squared meters room with separate miking for the foot and the fiddle (violin), using close-up Shure SM-58 microphones and a Focusrite sound card recorded in Audacity on a Macbook PRO. The mixture signals were created by adding the two isolated signals together. All the recordings have been made using the same instrument, which was played by the same performer.

The audio files are uncompressed and saved as stereo files with sampling frequency of 44100 Hz and 32 bits per sample. The average duration for a recording in Tap & Fiddle is 65 seconds, which totalise around 65 x 28 = 30m 20s of full play time.

Download and Licensing

If you want to download the dataset, you can find it here. You just have to fill a a small form with youra email address and explain why you want to download the dataset for.

The Tap & Fiddle Dataset has been compiled by Carlos Lordelo, Sven Ahlbäck, Emmanouil Benetos, Simon Dixon and Patrik Ohlsson and is offered for non-commercial research use only. The data is provided for educational purposes only and the material should not be used for any commercial purpose.

More specifically, the data is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

The creators of Tap & Fiddle and their corresponding affiliation institutes are not liable for, and expressly exclude, all liability for loss or damage however and whenever caused to anyone by any use of Tap & Fiddle or any part of it.

How to cite

If you use this dataset, please, provide the following citation in your work:

• C. Lordelo, E. Benetos, S. Dixon, S. Ahlbäck and P. Ohlsson “Adversarial Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation” in IEEE Signal Processing Letters 2020 (under review at time of this writing)

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 765068

Contact Information

For queries and suggestions regarding the Tap & Fiddle Dataset, please send me an email. You can find it at my homepage