What makes Bach sound like Bach? New dataset teaches algorithms classical music

What makes Bach sound like Bach? MusicNet is a new publicly available dataset from UW researchers that labels each note of 330 classical compositions in ways that can teach machine learning algorithms about the basic structure of music.Yngve Bakken Nilsen, flickr The composer Johann Sebastian Bach left behind an incomplete fugue upon his death, either as an unfinished work or perhaps as a puzzle for future composers to solve. A classical music dataset released Wednesday by University of Washington researchers -- which enables machine learning algorithms to learn the features of classical music from scratch -- raises the likelihood that a computer could expertly finish the job. MusicNet is the first publicly available large-scale classical music dataset with curated fine-level annotations. It's designed to allow machine learning researchers and algorithms to tackle a wide range of open challenges -- from note prediction to automated music transcription to offering listening recommendations based on the structure of a song a person likes, instead of relying on generic tags or what other customers have purchased. "At a high level, we're interested in what makes music appealing to the ears, how we can better understand composition, or the essence of what makes Bach sound like Bach. It can also help enable practical applications that remain challenging, like automatic transcription of a live performance into a written score," said Sham Kakade, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and of statistics.