# JS Fake Chorales: a Synthetic Dataset of Polyphonic Music with Human Annotation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10388 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10388/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [The Chamber Ensemble Generator: Limitless High-Quality MIR Data via Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14458/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Music Generation: Agents, Domains and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13944/) (2022)
- [Choir Transformer: Generating Polyphonic Music with Relative Attention on Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02531/) (2023)
- [Sound Check: Auditing Audio Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13114/) (2024)
- [CoCoFormer: A controllable feature-rich polyphonic music generation method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09843/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality datasets for learning-based modelling of polyphonic symbolic music remain less readily-accessible at scale than in other domains, such as language modelling or image classification. Deep learning algorithms show great potential for enabling the widespread use of interactive music generation technology in consumer applications, but the lack of large-scale datasets remains a bottleneck for the development of algorithms that can consistently generate high-quality outputs. We propose that models with narrow expertise can serve as a source of high-quality scalable synthetic data, and open-source the JS Fake Chorales, a dataset of 500 pieces generated by a new learning-based algorithm, provided in MIDI form. We take consecutive outputs from the algorithm and avoid cherry-picking in order to validate the potential to further scale this dataset on-demand. We conduct an online experiment for human evaluation, designed to be as fair to the listener as possible, and find that respondents were on average only 7% better than random guessing at distinguishing JS Fake Chorales from real chorales composed by JS Bach. Furthermore, we make anonymised data collected from experiments available along with the MIDI samples. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of using the synthetic pieces for research in polyphonic music modelling, and find that we can improve on state-of-the-art validation set loss for the canonical JSB Chorales dataset, using a known algorithm, by simply augmenting the training set with the JS Fake Chorales.