{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-nes-music-database-a-multi-instrumental","title":"The NES Music Database: A multi-instrumental dataset with expressive performance attributes","arxiv_id":"1806.04278","date":"2018-06-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chris Donahue","Huanru Henry Mao","Julian McAuley"],"abstract":"Existing research on music generation focuses on composition, but often\nignores the expressive performance characteristics required for plausible\nrenditions of resultant pieces. In this paper, we introduce the Nintendo\nEntertainment System Music Database (NES-MDB), a large corpus allowing for\nseparate examination of the tasks of composition and performance. NES-MDB\ncontains thousands of multi-instrumental songs composed for playback by the\ncompositionally-constrained NES audio synthesizer. For each song, the dataset\ncontains a musical score for four instrument voices as well as expressive\nattributes for the dynamics and timbre of each voice. Unlike datasets comprised\nof General MIDI files, NES-MDB includes all of the information needed to render\nexact acoustic performances of the original compositions. Alongside the\ndataset, we provide a tool that renders generated compositions as NES-style\naudio by emulating the device's audio processor. Additionally, we establish\nbaselines for the tasks of composition, which consists of learning the\nsemantics of composing for the NES synthesizer, and performance, which involves\nfinding a mapping between a composition and realistic expressive attributes.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04278v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04278v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-nes-music-database-a-multi-instrumental","repo_url":"https://github.com/chrisdonahue/nesmdb","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"the-nes-music-database-a-multi-instrumental","repo_url":"https://github.com/xgarcia238/8bit-VAE","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"music-generation","task_name":"Music Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"nes-mdb","name":"NES-MDB","full_name":"Nintendo Entertainment System Music Database"}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}