Some weeks ago we announced the release of a new dataset of flamenco singing: TONAS

The dataset includes 72 sung excerpts representative of three a cappella flamenco singing styles, i.e. Tonás (Debla and two variants of Martinete), together with manually corrected fundamental frequency and note transcriptions.

This collection was built by the COFLA team in the context of our research project for melodic transcription, similarity and style classification in flamenco music.

• Mora, J., Gomez, F., Gomez, E., Escobar-Borrego, F.J., Diaz-Banez, J.M. (2010). Melodic Characterization and Similarity in A Cappella Flamenco Cantes. 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010).
• Gomez, E., Bonada, J. (in Press). Towards Computer-Assisted Flamenco Transcription: An Experimental Comparison of Automatic Transcription Algorithms As Applied to A Cappella Singing. Computer Music Journal.

Further information about the music collection, how the samples were transcribed and by who, is available on the dataset website, where you can of course download the audio, metadata and transcription files.

We hope that this collection will be useful, whether for automatic transcription of the singing voice or any other research topic (e.g. pitch estimation, onset detection, melodic similarity, singer identification, style classification), and we hope this dataset will increase the interest of our scientific community on the particular challenges of flamenco singing.

For the moment we got quite a number of downloads for different purposes: research on music transcription, onset detection, folk music, personal study of singing techniques, and even for curiosity! 🙂