A Comprehensive Online Database of Machine-Readable Lead-Sheets for Jazz Standards

Jazz standards are songs representative of a body of musical knowledge shared by most professional jazz musicians. As such, the corpus of jazz standards constitutes a unique opportunity to study a musical genre with a “closed-world” approach, since most jazz composers are no longer in activity today. Although many scores for jazz standards can be found on the Internet, no effort, to our knowledge, has been dedicated so far to building a comprehensive database of machine-readable scores for jazz standards. This paper reports on the rationale, design and population of such a database, containing harmonic (chord progressions) as well as melodic and structural information. The database can be used to feed both analysis and generation systems. We report on preliminary results in this vein. We get around the tricky and often unclear copyright issues imposed by the publishing industry, by providing only statistical information about songs. The completeness of such a database should benefit many research experiments in MIR and opens up novel and exciting applications in music generation exploiting symbolic information, notably in style modeling.