NMED-T: A Tempo-Focused Dataset of Cortical and Behavioral Responses to Naturalistic Music

Understanding human perception of music is foundational to many research topics in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). While the field of MIR has shown a rising interest in the study of brain responses, access to data remains an obstacle. Here we introduce the Naturalistic Music EEG Dataset—Tempo (NMED-T), an open dataset of electrophysiological and behavioral responses collected from 20 participants who heard a set of 10 commercially available musical works. Song stimuli span various genres and tempos, and all contain electronically produced beats in duple meter. Preprocessed and aggregated responses include dense-array EEG and sensorimotor synchronization (tapping) responses, behavioral ratings of the songs, and basic demographic information. These data, along with illustrative analysis code, are published in Matlab format. Raw EEG and tapping data are also made available. In this paper we describe the construction of the dataset, present results from illustrative analyses, and document the format and attributes of the published data. This dataset facilitates reproducible research in neuroscience and cognitive MIR, and points to several possible avenues for future studies on human processing of naturalistic music.