The Harmonix Set: Beats, Downbeats, and Functional Segment Annotations of Western Popular Music

We introduce the Harmonix set: a collection of annotations of beats, downbeats, and functional segmentation for over 900 full tracks that covers a wide range of western popular music. Given the variety of annotated music information types in this set, and how strongly these three types of data are typically intertwined, we seek to foster research that focuses on multiple retrieval tasks at once. The dataset includes additional metadata such as MusicBrainz identifiers to support the linking of the dataset to third-party information or audio data when available. We describe the methodology employed in acquiring this set, including the annotation process and song selection. In addition, an initial data exploration of the annotations and actual dataset content is conducted. Finally, we provide a series of baselines of the Harmonix set with reference beat-trackers, downbeat estimation, and structural segmentation algorithms.

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