Updated paradata

v2.6

chore: files updated with tag: v2.6

First public release

This is a README file for a data repository originating from the DCML corpus initiative
and serves as welcome page for both

• the GitHub repo https://github.com/DCMLab/ravel_piano and the corresponding
• documentation page https://dcmlab.github.io/ravel_piano

For information on how to obtain and use the dataset, please refer to this documentation page.

Maurice Ravel – Piano Pieces (A corpus of annotated scores)

These piano showpieces are emblematic of the initial flowering of Ravel's advanced style that occurred around the end of
his troubled years at the Paris Conservatoire. Both Jeux d'eau and the suite Miroirs were products of Ravel's
association with the avant-garde artists' collective Les Apaches, and each of the five pieces of Miroirs is dedicated to
one or another of Ravel's colleagues in the group. The latter pieces are also well-known in orchestral versions, which
have been scored by composers including (besides Ravel himself) Percy Grainger and Steven Stucky.

Getting the data

• download repository as a ZIP file
• download a Frictionless Datapackage that includes concatenations
  of the TSV files in the four folders (measures, notes, chords, and harmonies) and a JSON descriptor:
  • ravel_piano.zip
  • ravel_piano.datapackage.json
• clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/DCMLab/ravel_piano.git

Data Formats

Each piece in this corpus is represented by five files with identical name prefixes, each in its own folder.
For example, the piano piece Jeux d’eau has the following files:

• MS3/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.mscx: Uncompressed MuseScore 3.6.2 file including the music and annotation labels.
• notes/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.notes.tsv: A table of all note heads contained in the score and their relevant features (not each of them represents an onset, some are tied together)
• measures/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.measures.tsv: A table with relevant information about the measures in the score.
• chords/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.chords.tsv: A table containing layer-wise unique onset positions with the musical markup (such as dynamics, articulation, lyrics, figured bass, etc.).
• harmonies/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.harmonies.tsv: A table of the included harmony labels (including cadences and phrases) with their positions in the score.

Each TSV file comes with its own JSON descriptor that describes the meanings and datatypes of the columns ("fields") it contains,
follows the Frictionless specification,
and can be used to validate and correctly load the described file.

Opening Scores

After navigating to your local copy, you can open the scores in the folder MS3 with the free and open source score
editor MuseScore. Please note that the scores have been edited, annotated and tested with
MuseScore 3.6.2.
MuseScore 4 has since been released which renders them correctly but cannot store them back in the same format.

Opening TSV files in a spreadsheet

Tab-separated value (TSV) files are like Comma-separated value (CSV) files and can be opened with most modern text
editors. However, for correctly displaying the columns, you might want to use a spreadsheet or an addon for your
favourite text editor. When you use a spreadsheet such as Excel, it might annoy you by interpreting fractions as
dates. This can be circumvented by using Data --> From Text/CSV or the free alternative
LibreOffice Calc. Other than that, TSV data can be loaded with
every modern programming language.

Loading TSV files in Python

Since the TSV files contain null values, lists, fractions, and numbers that are to be treated as strings, you may want
to use this code to load any TSV files related to this repository (provided you're doing it in Python). After a quick
pip install -U ms3 (requires Python 3.10 or later) you'll be able to load any TSV like this:

import ms3

labels = ms3.load_tsv("harmonies/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.harmonies.tsv")
notes = ms3.load_tsv("notes/Ravel_-_Jeux_dEau.notes.tsv")

Version history

See the GitHub releases.

Questions, Suggestions, Corrections, Bug Reports

Please create an issue and/or feel free to fork and submit pull requests.

Cite as

Johannes Hentschel, Yannis Rammos, Markus Neuwirth, & Martin Rohrmeier. (2025). Maurice Ravel – Piano Pieces (A corpus of annotated scores) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/{{ concept_doi }}

License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Eliminate Warnings

https://op-musicology.epfl.ch/projects/distant-listening-corpus/work_packages/1367

All warnings resolved; current MS3 version 2.5.3

Finalizing metadata

Warnings were handled on this branch as well. In this case I didn't bother resetting the score layout since with the amount of complex cross-staff writing it would have looked horrid. See what you think.

enriches readme with historical background and harmonic observations

I appreciated the note about this repo as a test of the 'extreme' of the annotation standard and I see how it's provided a useful basis for our 20th-century efforts since then!

Update corpus with ms3 2.4.0

That involves adding the chords facet for accessing, not chord labels, but articulation, dynamics, etc.