Text2Score ABC Notation Dataset

A large-scale symbolic music dataset in ABC notation, curated to support text-driven sheet music generation. Released as part of the Text2Score project.

🚀 Download & Install Dataset

pip install -U huggingface_hub hf-transfer
export HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1
huggingface-cli download datasets/mimbres/text2score --local-dir ABC_Dataset
cd ABC_Dataset
tar xf ABC_Dataset_only_abci_pkl_json.tar

📖 Dataset Description

This dataset comprises 621,162 pieces in ABC notation, assembled from multiple sources via MIDI-to-ABC conversion (quantized MIDI only, for training quality), direct XML-to-ABC conversion, and publicly available online repositories. The collection spans a broad range of genres and instrumentation, including chamber music, symphonies, film soundtracks, folk tunes, choral works, and solo instrument pieces.

Source	Count
ABC Notation Data	316,118
PDMX Dataset	253,339
SymphonyNet (Contemporary MIDI)	45,629
Wikifonia Dataset	6,076
ASAP Dataset	234
Total	621,162

📝 Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite our paper (BibTeX to be updated upon arXiv release):

@article{bhandari2025text2score,
  title     = {Text2Score: Generating Sheet Music from Textual Prompts},
  author    = {Bhandari, Keshav and Chang, Sungkyun and Roy, Abhinaba and Ronchini, Francesca and Benetos, Emmanouil and Herremans, Dorien and Colton, Simon},
  journal   = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.13431},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13431}
}

⚖️ License

This dataset is a composite assembled from multiple sources. Each source carries its own license — users must comply with all applicable terms for the subsets they use. Full license texts are provided in the LICENSES/ directory of this repository.

Source	License	Full text
PDMX Dataset	MIT	LICENSES/LICENSE_PDMX.txt
SymphonyNet (Contemporary MIDI)	MIT	LICENSES/LICENSE_SYMPHONYNET.txt
ASAP Dataset	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	LICENSES/LICENSE_ASAP.txt
Wikifonia / EWLD	Non-commercial, restricted access ⚠️	LICENSES/LICENSE_WIKIFONIA.txt
ABC Notation Data (converted)	Varies by piece; see LICENSE for details	—

⚠️ Wikifonia / EWLD notice: The original EWLD dataset on Zenodo is restricted-access and requires users to explicitly agree to non-commercial terms before obtaining access. Redistribution of EWLD-derived content may not be permitted without authorisation from the original author; users should independently verify compliance. A public-domain subset is available as OpenEWLD.

⚠️ Overall constraint: The most restrictive licenses in this composite (ASAP: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; Wikifonia: non-commercial only) mean the full dataset may only be used for non-commercial research purposes. For commercial use, restrict to the PDMX and SymphonyNet subsets (both MIT-licensed).

See LICENSE at the root of this repository for a full composite summary.