GuiTones-I: An audio-visual database of monophonic guitar tones

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is considered one of the most complex problems in music information retrieval (MIR). Many attempts of transcribing polyphonic music have been made in the past but monophonic tones, that build melodious music pieces, still remain largely untouched. The foremost approach is preparation of a database consisting of isolated and continuous monophonic sounds in order to proceed with the recognition and transcription of monophonic music pieces. In this paper one such audio-visual database of monophonic guitar tones for multi-modal signal processing has been introduced and evaluated for a test case of both online and offline recognition and transcription. The database comprises of recorded audio samples of first nine frets for all six strings and images of different ways in which the fretboard was held while playing these frets. A total of over 10,000 audio-visual samples have been recorded by 40 amateur and professional guitarists. The prepared database will be made available for free download under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and in DVDs at a nominal cost covering shipping and handling charges.