El Bongosero

El Bongosero

A Dataset of Hand-Played Bongo Grooves Accompanying Drum Patterns

Dataset Bongo Percussion Interactive-Installation
Status: Finished, no active maintenance
Dataset & Docs

Developed by Nicholas Evans and me.

  1. El Bongosero: A Crowd-sourced Symbolic Dataset of Improvised Hand Percussion Rhythms Paired with Drum Patterns

    El Bongosero: A Crowd-sourced Symbolic Dataset of Improvised Hand Percussion Rhythms Paired with Drum Patterns

    Nicholas Evans*, Behzad Haki*, Daniel Gomez, and 1 more

    * Equal contribution

    Proceedings of the 24th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference · 2024
    PDFWebsiteSlidesPoster
    Abstract

    We present El Bongosero, a large-scale, open-source symbolic dataset comprising expressive, improvised drum performances crowd-sourced from a pool of individuals with varying levels of musical expertise. Originating from an interactive installation hosted at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, our dataset consists of 6,035 unique tapped sequences performed by 3,184 participants. To our knowledge, this is the only symbolic dataset of its size and type that includes expressive timing and dynamics information as well as each participant’s level of expertise. These unique characteristics could prove to be valuable to future research, particularly in the areas of music generation and music education. Preliminary analysis, including a step-wise Jaccard similarity analysis on a subset of the data, demonstrate that this dataset is a diverse, nonrandom, and musically meaningful collection. To facilitate prompt exploration and understanding of the data, we have also prepared a dedicated website and an open-source API in order to interact with the data.

    BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Haki2024ELBNG,
  title = {{El Bongosero: A Crowd-sourced Symbolic Dataset of Improvised Hand Percussion Rhythms Paired with Drum Patterns}},
  author = {Evans, Nicholas and Haki, Behzad and Gomez, Daniel and Jorda, Sergi},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 24th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference}},
  year = {2024},
  month = nov,
  publisher = {ISMIR},
}

    ## License

    See the El Bongosero website for license information.

    overview

    Overview

    El Bongosero is a dataset of hand-played bongo grooves that accompany drum patterns.

    This project was also featured as an interactive installation at the CCCB’s exhibition “AI: Artificial Intelligence” in Barcelona (October 2023 – March 2024).

    Full information: elbongosero.github.io