Creating Research Corpora for the Computational Study of Music: the case of the CompMusic Project

A fundamental concern in music information research is the use of appropriate data sets, research corpora, from which to perform the needed data processing tasks. These corpora have to be suited for the specific research problems to be addressed and the design criteria with which to create them is a research task to which not much attention has been paid. In the CompMusic project we are studying several non-western art music traditions and a major effort has been the creation of appropriate data collections with which to study and characterise the melodic and rhythmic aspects of these traditions. In this article we go over the criteria used to create these collections and we describe the specificities of each of the collections gathered.