Building a Dataset for Music Sample Identification

Abstract

Sample identification (SI) is the task of matching an element of a musical work to its musically transformed versions used to create new works. The task has received little attention and lacks large-scale publicly available data. In this work, we mine sampling annotations from a music database and split them for training and evaluation. The resulting dataset is nearly three orders of magnitude larger than the existing SI benchmarks, with training, validation, and test sets of 114 k, 6 k, and 10 k tracks. We find that naively splitting the annotations places the same tracks in different sets. To avoid this, we construct a graph from the annotations and split it over connected components. We further find that a single mega-component contains half of the annotations, making component-wise splitting incompatible with balanced splits; we trim it, yielding a leakage-aware pipeline. We share the dataset for non-commercial scientific research purposes only and make the data-analysis and splitting code publicly available. We hope that our work fosters research on SI.

Extended Abstracts for the Late-Breaking Demo Session of the 27th Int. Society for Music Information Retrieval Conf., 2026