Datasets:

pianistprogrammer
/

abc2vec-irish-folk

license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - other
language:
  - en
tags:
  - music
  - folk-music
  - irish-traditional-music
  - abc-notation
  - symbolic-music
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M

ABC2Vec Irish Folk Music Dataset

This dataset contains 211,524 Irish traditional tunes in ABC notation, preprocessed and split for training representation learning models.

Dataset Description

Curated by: IrishMAN Dataset (The Session + ABCnotation.com)
Processed for: ABC2Vec: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Irish Folk Music
Language: ABC notation (symbolic music format)
License: CC-BY-4.0

Dataset Structure

Data Splits

Split	Tunes	File Size
Train	198,893	70 MB
Validation	10,469	3.7 MB
Test	2,162	778 KB
Total	211,524	~74 MB

Data Fields

Each tune contains:

tune_id: Unique identifier
title: Tune name
abc_body: ABC notation of the melody
tune_type: Rhythmic category (jig, reel, polka, waltz, etc.)
mode: Tonal mode (major, minor, dorian, mixolydian)
key: Key signature
meter: Time signature
bar_count: Number of bars in the tune

Dataset Statistics

Tune Types: 44.9% reels, 21.3% jigs, 14.5% polkas, 12.2% waltzes
Modes: 80.2% major, 11.3% minor, 5.4% Dorian, 3.0% Mixolydian
Keys: 30.5% G, 26.8% D, 13.9% A (sharp keys dominant)
Median Length: 18 bars, 287 characters

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the entire dataset
dataset = load_dataset("pianistprogrammer/abc2vec-irish-folk-dataset")

# Access splits
train = dataset["train"]
val = dataset["validation"]
test = dataset["test"]

# Example tune
print(train[0]["abc_body"])
print(f"Type: {train[0]['tune_type']}, Mode: {train[0]['mode']}")

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@article{abc2vec2025,
  title={ABC2Vec: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Irish Folk Music},
  author={[Your Name]},
  journal={[Journal Name]},
  year={2025}
}

Source

This dataset is derived from:

The Session (thesession.org): Community-maintained Irish traditional music archive
ABCnotation.com: Long-standing ABC notation repository

Processed as part of the IrishMAN (Irish Music ABC Notation) corpus.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0)

The original tunes are traditional folk music in the public domain. This processed dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0.

Additional Files

vocab.json: Character vocabulary for tokenization (98 tokens)
metadata.csv: Complete metadata for all 211,524 tunes

Contact

For questions or issues with this dataset, please open an issue on the ABC2Vec GitHub repository.