# Aria-MIDI: A Dataset of Piano MIDI Files for Symbolic Music Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Pretrained Foundation Models: A History from BERT to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09419/) (2023)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [Onsets and Frames: Dual-Objective Piano Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11153/) (2017)
- [MusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05630/) (2021)
- [MT3: Multi-Task Multitrack Music Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03017/) (2021)
- [High-resolution Piano Transcription with Pedals by Regressing Onset and Offset Times](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01815/) (2020)
- [Learning Features of Music from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09827/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01620/) (2017)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Piano Transcription with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09142/) (2021)
- [GiantMIDI-Piano: A large-scale MIDI dataset for classical piano music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07061/) (2020)
- [Anticipatory Music Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08620/) (2023)
- [Automatic Piano Transcription with Hierarchical Frequency-Time Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04305/) (2023)
- [The Sound Demixing Challenge 2023 unicodex2013 Music Demixing Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06979/) (2023)
- [A Data-Driven Analysis of Robust Automatic Piano Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01424/) (2024)
- [YourMT3+: Multi-instrument Music Transcription with Enhanced Transformer Architectures and Cross-dataset Stem Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04822/) (2024)
- [The Sound Demixing Challenge 2023 unicodex2013 Cinematic Demixing Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06981/) (2023)
- [A Tutorial on Deep Learning for Music Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04396/) (2017)
- [GAPS: A Large and Diverse Classical Guitar Dataset and Benchmark Transcription Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08653/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the Corpus Bias Problem in Automatic Music Transcription Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04737/) (2024)
- [A Hybrid Recurrent Neural Network For Music Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1623/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Scaling Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Symbolic Piano Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23869/) (2025)
- [Towards an AI Musician: Synthesizing Sheet Music Problems for Musical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04059/) (2025)
- [Moonbeam: A MIDI Foundation Model Using Both Absolute and Relative Music Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15559/) (2025)
- [Pianist Transformer: Towards Expressive Piano Performance Rendering via Scalable Self-Supervised Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02652/) (2025)
- [PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06627/) (2026)
- [Structural priors for data-efficient language learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11505/) (2026)
- [Amadeus: Autoregressive Model with Bidirectional Attribute Modelling for Symbolic Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20665/) (2025)
- [A Traditional Approach to Symbolic Piano Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12267/) (2025)
- [The Ghost in the Keys: A Disklavier Demo for Human-AI Musical Co-Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01663/) (2025)
- [Integrating Contextual Embeddings into Evaluation of Expressive MIDI Piano Performances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27909/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce an extensive new dataset of MIDI files, created by transcribing audio recordings of piano performances into their constituent notes. The data pipeline we use is multi-stage, employing a language model to autonomously crawl and score audio recordings from the internet based on their metadata, followed by a stage of pruning and segmentation using an audio classifier. The resulting dataset contains over one million distinct MIDI files, comprising roughly 100,000 hours of transcribed audio. We provide an in-depth analysis of our techniques, offering statistical insights, and investigate the content by extracting metadata tags, which we also provide. Dataset available at https://github.com/loubbrad/aria-midi.