As a part of an ongoing research collaboration between the Centre for Digital Music of the Queen Mary University of London and the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, we are happy to announce the launch of Song Describer, a crowdsourcing initiative to collect the first open research dataset of music captions.

Song Describer is an open-source annotation platform featuring CC-licensed music that anyone can annotate with natural language descriptions. Through this platform, we aim to create the first research dataset of music-caption pairs, which will give us insights into how people describe music and support the development of audio-text ML models.

There is an increasing need for music datasets that go beyond categorical labels and we hope that our data collection efforts will promote more research on the relationship between natural language and music audio, and its many potential applications. If you're interested in this field or are curious or willing to contribute, you can head to Song Describer to read more about it and start annotating right away!

For more information about the platform's design, see the late-breaking demo presented at the ISMIR 2022 conference: https://ismir2022program.ismir.net/lbd_405.html