PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset

PianoCoRe is a large-scale piano MIDI dataset that unifies and refines major open-source piano corpora. It contains 250,046 performances of 5,625 pieces written by 483 composers, totaling 21,763 hours of performed music.

PianoCoRe provides the most diverse composer- and composition-annotated piano MIDI data. The metadata includes deduplication flags, MIDI quality labels and precise note-level score-performance alignments.

The alignments are refined using a Refined Alignment for Scores and Performances (RAScoP) pipeline, integrated into the Symbolic Music Performance modeling (SyMuPe) Python package. The pipeline ensures perfect note-by-note score-performance synchronization for expressive performance modeling.

Related Resources

• Publication: https://transactions.ismir.net/articles/10.5334/tismir.333
• GitHub: https://github.com/ilya16/PianoCoRe
• Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/19186016

Note: This Hugging Face version stores data in compressed Parquet files with raw bytes. If you prefer plain MIDI files in a directory structure, please use the Zenodo Mirror.

Dataset Tiers

Dataset	Composers	Pieces	Performances	Hours	Scores	Alignments
PianoCoRe-C	483	5,625	250,046	21,763	75.3%	no
PianoCoRe-B	478	5,591	214,092	18,757	75.0%	no
PianoCoRe-A	151	1,591	157,207	12,509	100%	note
PianoCoRe-A*	137	1,517	130,275	10,330	100%	note

To support different research applications, the dataset is organized into tiered subsets:

• PianoCoRe-C (Combined): a complete mixed-source piano performance collection.

  Applications: piano performance analysis, data cleaning algorithms.

• PianoCoRe-B (Base): a deduplicated and quality-filtered subset.

  Applications: large-scale pre-training, piano performance generation.

• PianoCoRe-A (Aligned): a subset containing performances aligned to score.

  Applications: score-performance analysis, expressive piano performance rendering.

• PianoCoRe-A*: a high quality subset of the best-quality performances and note-level alignments.

  Applications: expressive piano performance rendering, performance-to-score transcription.

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Dataset Metadata

The PianoCoRe metadata rows are organized using a natural sort based on performance MIDI paths. The following fields are defined for each entry:

Core:

• id (string): unique sample ID (format: PianoCoRe_XXXXXX)
• composer (string): name of the composer (format: [last_name],_[first_name])
• composition (string): title of the musical work/composition
• movement (string, optional): name of the specific movement/part of the composition
• performance_id (string): ID of the performance MIDI file, derived from the source dataset name and its internal ID

Subsets:

• split (string): dataset split (train or test)
• tier_b (bool): whether the performance is in the PianoCoRe-B subset (deduplicated and quality-filtered)
• tier_a (bool):whether the performance is in the PianoCoRe-A subset (note-aligned to scores)
• tier_a_star (bool): whether the performance is in the PianoCoRe-A* subset (highest-confidence alignments)

Score:

• score_dataset (string, optional): source dataset for the score MusicXML/MXL files (ASAP/ATEPP/PDMX/MuseScore)
• score_id (string, optional): ID of the score MIDI file, either as in the source dataset or built using the source dataset name and ID
• score_xml_path (string, optional): path to the score MusicXML/MXL file within the raw/ directory
• score_midi_path (string, optional): path to the score MIDI file within the raw/ directory
• score_note_count (integer, optional): number of notes in the score MIDI
• score_duration (float, optional): duration of the score MIDI in seconds

Performance:

• performance_dataset (string): source dataset of the performance MIDI
• performance_midi_path (string): path to the performance MIDI file within the raw/ directory
• performance_note_count (integer): number of notes in the performance MIDI
• performance_duration (float): duration of the performance MIDI in seconds
• performer (string, optional) name of the pianist (if available)
• is_transcription (bool): whether the performance MIDI was transcribed from audio
• capture_model (string): hardware (e.g., Yamaha Disklavier) or ML model used to transcribe the MIDI

Raw alignment:

• raw_alignment_path (string, optional): path to the raw _align.npz score-performance alignment file within the raw/ directory, contains indices, pitches and onset for score and performance notes
• raw_recall (float, optional): $R_a$, raw alignment recall
• raw_precision (float, optional): $P_a$, raw alignment precision
• raw_adjusted_alignment_ratio (float, optional): $R'_a$, raw alignment adjusted alignment ratio, defined as $R'_a = \max(P_a, R_a)$

Deduplication (PianoCoRe-B):

• is_duplicate (bool): whether the performance is a near-duplicate of the other performance (lead_performance)
• lead_performance (string, optional): path to the main (higher priority) version for the duplicate performance MIDI

Quality labels (PianoCoRe-B):

• quality_label (string): MIDI quality label predicted by the classifier ('score', 'high quality', 'low quality' or 'corrupted')
• prob_score (float): classifier confidence for Score (S) MIDI quality class
• prob_high_quality (float): classifier confidence for High Quality (HQ) MIDI quality class
• prob_low_quality (float): classifier confidence for Low Quality (LQ) MIDI quality class
• prob_corrupted (float): classifier confidence for Corrupted (C) MIDI quality class

Refined score, performance and alignment (PianoCoRe-A/A*):

• is_refined (bool): whether the performance MIDI was cleaned and refined
• refined_score_midi_path (string, optional): path to the refined (single-track) score MIDI file within the refined/ directory
• refined_score_note_count (integer, optional): number of notes in the refined score MIDI
• refined_score_duration (float, optional): duration of the refined score MIDI in seconds
• refined_performance_midi_path (string, optional): path to the refined (note-by-note aligned) performance MIDI file within the refined/ directory
• refined_performance_note_count (integer, optional): number of notes in the refined performance MIDI
• refined_performance_interpolated_note_count (integer, optional): number of synthetic notes added during the interpolation stage
• refined_performance_duration (float, optional): duration of the refined performance MIDI in seconds
• refined_alignment_path (string, optional): path to the _refined_align.npz score-performance alignment file within the refined/ directory, contains performance indices and boolean interpolation mask
• refined_recall (float, optional): $R_{RAScoP}$, refined alignment recall

Binary data:

• score_xml_bytes (binary, optional) raw data for the score MusicXML/MXL file
• score_midi_bytes (binary, optional) raw data for the score MIDI file
• performance_midi_bytes (binary): raw data for the performance MIDI file
• raw_alignment_bytes (binary, optional): raw data for the raw .npz alignment file
• refined_score_midi_bytes (binary, optional): raw data for the refined score MIDI file
• refined_performance_midi_bytes (binary, optional): raw data for the refined performance MIDI file
• refined_alignment_bytes (binary, optional): raw data for the refined .npz alignment file

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Ethical Statement

The curation of large-scale symbolic datasets presents challenges regarding copyright and intellectual property. A best-effort attempt was made to filter PianoCoRe according to European Union public-domain regulations (works whose authors have been deceased for more than 70 years).

Licensing and Terms of Use

The dataset, original and processed files, metadata, and alignment annotations are published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The license respects the licenses used for the source datasets. The underlying MIDI transcriptions are provided strictly for non-commercial research and educational purposes.

Acknowledgments

PianoCoRe is built upon the invaluable contributions of the open music information retrieval community and existing open-source datasets. Acknowledgements and credits are given to the creators of the following source corpora:

Dataset	Reference	Links	License
MAESTRO	Hawthorne et al. (2019)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
ASAP	Foscarin et al. (2020)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
(n)ASAP	Peter et al. (2023)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
ATEPP	Zhang et al. (2022)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY 4.0
GiantMIDI-Piano	Kong et al. (2022)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY 4.0
Aria-MIDI	Bradshaw and Colton (2025)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
PERiScoPe	Borovik et al. (2025)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
PDMX	Long et al. (2025)	Paper / Dataset	CC BY 4.0

Citation

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite:

@article{borovik2026pianocore,
  title={{PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset}},
  author={Borovik, Ilya},
  journal={Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval},
  volume={9},
  number={1},
  pages={144--163},
  year={2026},
  doi={10.5334/tismir.333}
}