README.md

---
license: mit
task_categories:
- text-generation
pretty_name: IrishMAN
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
tags:
- music
---

## Dataset Summary

The **Irish Massive ABC Notation (IrishMAN)** dataset consists of 216,284 Irish music tunes represented in the widely adopted [ABC notation](https://abcnotation.com/) format. This format uses ASCII text to represent a comprehensive set of musical symbols, including pitches, rhythms, and essential structural elements like section boundaries.

Curated from thesession.org and abcnotation.com, prominent platforms for sharing folk and traditional music, the dataset includes 214,122 tunes for training and 2,162 tunes for evaluation. Importantly, all tunes are automatically annotated with control codes, providing valuable representations of their musical forms and structures. Moreover, a subset of over 40,000 tunes includes chord symbols, further enhancing the dataset's potential for applications such as music generation and analysis.

The IrishMAN dataset serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers in musicology and artificial intelligence, offering insights into the exploration and understanding of Irish traditional music. It's noteworthy that all tunes in the dataset are non-copyrighted, ensuring ethical and legal usage for research and creative projects. However, it's important to acknowledge that the automatic extraction of control codes for musical forms might introduce some accuracy limitations. Control codes are symbols added to the ABC notation to indicate the intended musical form of the generated melodies.

## Control Codes

Drawing inspiration from [CTRL](https://huggingface.co/ctrl), control codes are incorporated into TunesFormer to represent musical forms. These codes, positioned before the ABC notation, allow users to specify the structures of the generated tunes. The following control codes are introduced:

- **B:number of bars**: This code enables users to define the desired number of bars within a section. It utilizes the bar symbol `|` to establish the length of each section. The dataset's section length ranges from 1 to 32 bars (e.g., `B:1` for a one-bar section, and `B:32` for a section with 32 bars).

- **S:number of sections**: With this control code, users can determine the overall structure of the generated melody by specifying the number of sections it should contain. Various symbols represent section boundaries, including `[|`, `||`, `|]`, `|:`, `::`, and `:|`. The dataset's range for the number of sections is from 1 to 8 (e.g., `S:1` for a single-section melody, and `S:8` for a melody with eight sections).

- **E:edit distance similarity**: This control code provides fine-grained control over the similarity between the current section ($c$) and a previous section ($p$) in the generated melody. Similarity is calculated using the Levenshtein distance, measuring the difference between two sequences. The edit distance similarity ($eds(c,p)$) is calculated as:
  ```
  eds(c,p) = 1 - lev(c,p) / max(|c|,|p|)
  ```
  where $|c|$ and $|p|$ are the string lengths of the two sections. The control code has 11 levels, ranging from no match to an exact match (e.g., `E:0` for no similarity, and `E:10` for an exact match).

## Copyright Disclaimer
The dataset is provided solely for research purposes and is not intended for commercial use. 

If you are the copyright owner of any tune included in the IrishMAN and have concerns about its inclusion, please contact us at shangda@mail.ccom.edu.cn to have it removed.

## Special Thanks
We would like to extend a special thanks to abcnotation.com and thesession.org for their contributions to the development and promotion of ABC notation, as well as their contributions to the field of music information retrieval. Their platforms have provided invaluable resources for the traditional and folk music community, and have made it possible for researchers like us to create and study large datasets like the Massive ABC notation Dataset.