MusiXQA 🎵

MusiXQA is a multimodal dataset for evaluating and training music sheet understanding systems. Each data sample is composed of:

• A scanned music sheet image (.png)
• Its corresponding MIDI file (.mid)
• A structured annotation (from metadata.json)
• Question–Answer (QA) pairs targeting musical structure, semantics, and optical music recognition (OMR)

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📂 Dataset Structure

MusiXQA/
├── images.tar             # PNG files of music sheets (e.g., 0000000.png)
├── midi.tar               # MIDI files (e.g., 0000000.mid), compressed
├── train_qa_omr.json      # OMR-tasks QA pairs (train split)
├── train_qa_simple.json   # Simple musical info QAs (train split)
├── test_qa_omr.json       # OMR-tasks QA pairs (test split)
├── test_qa_simple.json    # Simple musical info QAs (test split)
├── metadata.json          # Annotation for each document (e.g., key, time, instruments)

🧾 Metadata

The metadata.json file provides comprehensive annotations of the full music sheet content, facilitating research in symbolic music reasoning, score reconstruction, and multimodal alignment with audio or MIDI.

❓ QA Data Format

Each QA file (e.g., train_qa_omr.json) is a list of QA entries like this:

{
    "doc_id": "0086400",
    "question": "Please extract the pitch and duration of all notes in the 2nd bar of the treble clef.",
    "answer": "qB4~ sB4 e.E5~ sE5 sB4 eB4 e.E5 sG#4",
    "encode_format": "beat"
  },

• doc_id: corresponds to a sample in images/, midi/, and metadata.json
• question: natural language query
• answer: ground truth answer
• encode_format: how the input is encoded (e.g., "beat", "note", etc.)

🎓 Reference

If you use this dataset in your work, please cite it using the following reference:

@article{chen2025musixqa,
  title={MusiXQA: Advancing Visual Music Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models},
  author={Chen, Jian and Ma, Wenye and Liu, Penghang and Wang, Wei and Song, Tengwei and Li, Ming and Wang, Chenguang and Zhang, Ruiyi and Chen, Changyou},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23009},
  year={2025}
}