Piano Concerto Dataset (PCD): A Multitrack Dataset of Piano Concertos

Abstract

The piano concerto is a genre of central importance in Western classical music, often consisting of a virtuoso solo part for piano and an orchestral accompaniment. In this article, we introduce the Piano Concerto Dataset (PCD), which comprises a collection of excerpts with separate piano and orchestral tracks from piano concertos ranging from the Baroque to the Post-Romantic era. In particular, using existing backing tracks by the music publisher Music Minus One, we recorded excerpts from 15 different piano concertos played by five interpreters on various instruments under different acoustic conditions. The key challenge of playing along with pre-recorded orchestral accompaniments lies in the exact synchronization of the performer. For guiding the pianists for obtaining a high synchronization accuracy, we used additional click tracks generated with measure and beat annotations of the orchestral tracks, which also are provided in the PCD. The dataset is relevant for a variety of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, including music source separation, automatic accompaniment, music synchronization, editing, and upmixing.