2025 Automatic Music Transcription Challenge

An Online Competition

Summary

A competition of Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) will be held in April 2025. In this competition, participants submit computer programs that can convert audio recordings of classical styles to Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). A submitted computer program has up to 10 minutes to convert 100 recordings; each recording may be up to 20 seconds long and may contain at most three musical instruments. The rank of the submissions will consider multiple factors, including correct instruments, pitches, onset, offset, and dynamics. Most of the audio will be produced by using synthesized sound; a small percentage will be recorded from human performance.

2025 Competition Leaderboard

Contributing Composers

Photo	Name	Email	Organization
	Harry Bulow	hbulow@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Tae Hong Park	thp@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Allen McCullough	mccullo3@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Hubert Howe	hubert.howe@gmail.com	Juilliard School of Music (retired)
	Monte Taylor	mtaylor@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Mika Pelo	mpelo@ucdavis.edu	University of California, Davis

Organizers

Photo	Name	Email	Organization
	Tae Hong Park	thp@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Harry Bulow	hbulow@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Allen McCullough	mccullo3@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Kristen Yeon-Ji Yun	yun98@purdue.edu	Department of Music, Purdue University
	Yung-Hsiang Lu	yunglu@purdue.edu	School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
	George Thiruvathukal	gthiruvathukal@luc.edu	Department of Computer Science, Loyola University Chicago

Technical Details

Contestants will register on the website of https://ai4musicians.org/. Sample music (including the scores and the audio recordings) will be provided on the website. Contestants can use any data for training their programs. Submissions will be open in March 2025. The programs submitted to the website will run on a computer equipped with GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in Purdue's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/). Each team can submit at most once every 24 hours. A leaderboard will show the rank of the teams running the sample data. An additional set of holdout data will be used to determine the final rank and awards. A sample (open-source) solution will be available for contestants to study the input and output formats. If a submitted solution is inferior to the sample solution, the submitted solution is disqualified for consideration of an award. Winners will be invited to present their solutions at a conference (TBD).

For Contributing Composers

For the 2025 challenge, the composers are by invitation by the organizers only. The reason is that the organizers wish to manage the difficulty of the music so that computer programs can provide meaningful results. If a composer is interested in contributing, please contact the organizers. The composers will retain their copyright. Composers will agree to provide their music royalty-free and non-exclusive rights to the challenge organizers for the purpose of this automatic music transcription challenge, including (but not limited to) redistributing the music as samples and analyzing the music by computer programs. The organizers may modify the music from the composers to meet the restrictions of the scoring program. The names, profile photos, and links to the composers' websites will be listed on the https://ai4musicians.org/ website if a composer is selected by the organizers.

A composer will provide at least 10 and at most 30 pieces of music. Each piece is approximately 20 seconds long. These numbers aim to give each composer a reasonable representation without causing computer programs to "overfit" into a specific composer's style. Each piece is between 10 and 20 seconds. The music should be divided into 3 levels of difficulties: easy, medium, and difficult.

• Tempo range from 60 bpm-90 bpm
• Pitch range should be from C2 to C7
• The smallest rhythmic duration should be sixteenth-notes or sixteenth-rests
• No interpreted rhythms such as swing feel patterns (must ne clearly discernable without interpretation) If desiring a swing pattern, write as dotted eighth and sixteenth-note or quarter-note/eight-note triplets
• No doubly-dotted notes
• Can be rhythmically and melodically diverse
• Stay within the following meters: 3/4, 4/4, 6/8.
• Keep the dynamic range from pianissimo to fortissimo (pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff)
• Tonal, modal and atonal styles, or a blend of these, are all encouraged
• Up to three different instruments may be used in each composition. If piano is included in the instrumentation, keep the composition as a duet (piano and some other instrument). Avoid using violin and cello in combination with each other, due to their common timbral characteristics. When writing for multiple instruments (limit of 3), use a diversity of timbre combinations such as (1) flute and trombone, (2) violin and bassoon, (3) cello, oboe, and bassoon. Any combination of instruments is fine as long as the timbre of each is clearly discernable.
• Submit a score (PDF), MusicXML, and MIDI recording of each work.

List of Instruments

1. Piano
2. Violin
3. Cello
4. Flute
5. Bassoon
6. Trombone
7. Oboe
8. Viola

The instrument groups should not include instruments that can be misclassified easily even by human experts (e.g., violin and viola).

Cash Awards (tentative)

• The top award is up to $1,500 US Dollars.
• The second award is up to $1,000 US Dollars.
• The third award is $500 US Dollars.

The winners must open source their solutions before receiving the cash awards (required in the registration agreement). The source code should have proper documentation for reproducibility. The organizers will examine the source code before announcing the winners. The cash awards can be given to only the participants that are not in the embargoed and sanctioned countries declared by the United States.

The award may be in the form of cash or travel grants that may include conference registration + hotel + airplane ticket.

Schedule (Tentative)

• 2024/11/20 ten pieces of music from each composer (will be available to contestants).
• 2024/12/01 announce the competition.
• 2024/12/31 ten pieces of music from each composer (will not be available to contestants).
• 2025/01/01 registration open.
• 2025/02/01 release sample solution.
• 2025/03/01 submission open.
• 2025/03/31 submission close.
• 2025/04/30 announce winners.
• 2025/06 winners present their solutions in a conference (TBD)

Frequently Asked Questions