Research corpora are representative collections of data and are essential to develop data-driven approaches in Music Information Research (MIR). We address the problem of building research corpora for MIR in Indian art music traditions of Hindustani and Carnatic music, considering several relevant criteria for building such corpora. We also discuss a methodology to assess the corpora based on these criteria and present an evaluation of the corpora in their coverage and completeness. In addition to the corpora, we briefly describe the test datasets that we have built for use in many research tasks. In specific, we describe the tonic dataset, the Carnatic rhythm dataset, the Carnatic varṇaṁ dataset, and the Mridangam stroke dataset. The criteria and the evaluation methodology discussed in this article can be used to systematically build a representative and comprehensive research corpus. The corpora and the datasets are accessible to the research community from a central online repository.

The compilation of the corpora and the datasets presented in this paper has been a collective effort of the members of the CompMusic project and a number of collaborators. The CompMusic project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC grant agreement 267583).

Comunicació presentada a la International Computer Music Conference, ICMC/SMC, celebrada a Atenes (Grècia) del 14 al 20 de setembre de 2014.