Finnish Folk Song Database - Availability for Research

Music databases are useful tools for the basic research on the musical structure, classification and other such large-scale analytic and empirical techniques. Databases also facilitate the development of technical applications, such as various musical search and query methods (e.g., query-by-humming or finding melodic using symbolic information) that all fall under the general term of Music Information Retrieval (MIR, see ISMIR, The International Conferences on Music Information Retrieval and Related Activities).

There are not many large scale folk song collections available for research purposes. The Essen Folk song collection (Schaffrath, 1995) is one good example and various other, less well annotated databases exist as well, e.g., Themefinder and Meldex.

AVAILABILITY AND USAGE

The Finnish folk song database is available for research purposes (that is, noncommercial) provided that the attribution is maintained, i.e., you must give the original authors credit. To cite the Finnish Folk Music Database, use: Eerola, T., & Toiviainen, P. (2004). Suomen Kansan eSävelmät. Finnish Folk Song Database. [11.3.2004]. Available: http://www.jyu.fi/musica/sks/.

FORMATS

Matlab version of the tunes, encoded as MIDI Toolbox notematrices within a cell array, (2 Mb zipped archive)
MIDI files (3.5 Mb zipped archive)

Tune index (600 KB ASCII text)

The format of the Tune Index is shown below. Most of the columns are self-explanatory. Collection refers to abbreviated names of the subcollections, i.e., LS1= Laulusävelmät 1, RS1= Runosävelmät 1 and so on, see info page. The cadence columns refers to the classification system proposed by Ilmari Krohn (1902-1903).

key	collection	filename	type	cadence	name	page	transcriber	year	key	time-signature	location
1	LS1	ls1_0001		AIa1		3	M. Nyberg		F	4/4	Saarijärvi
2	LS1	ls1_0002		AIa1		3	H. Tepponen		F	4/4	Pieksämäki
3	LS1	ls1_0003		AIa1		4	S. Korpela		F	6/8	Teuva
...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...

DOWNLOAD

Update 6.2.2006: Note velocities set to uniform value (100) and file version updated for Matlab 7.

Update 17.4.2006: Tune index updated (53 tunes had wrong time-signatures and 166 songs were labeled by a single time-signature although they contained multiple time-signatures. These both types of mistakes have now been corrected by TE).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright of the original collection by © Finnish Literary Society, based on the publication Suomen Kansan Sävelmiä (Edited by I. Krohn, 1898-1930).
Copyright of the electronic collection: © Tuomas Eerola & Petri Toiviainen.

SUPPORTED BY

Finnish Literary Society

MOVE (Musiikin opetus ja tutkimus verkossa hanke)

Virtual University of Finland

Dept. of Music, University of Jyväskylä

References

Eerola, T., & Toiviainen, P. (2004). Suomen Kansan eSävelmät. Finnish Folk Song Database. [11.3.2004]. Available: http://www.jyu.fi/musica/sks
Krohn, I. (1902-1903). Welche ist die beste Metode um Volks- und volksmässige Melodien nach ihrer melodischen Beschaffenheit lexikalisch zu ordnen? Sammelbände der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft IV, 634-645.
Schaffrath, H. (1995). The Essen folksong collection in kern format. [computer database]. Menlo Park, CA: Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities.

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