Datasets

Environmental sounds

The list of datasets is currently maintained under DCASE Datalist

Introduction

Audio data collection and manual data annotation both are tedious processes, and the lack of a proper development dataset limits fast development in environmental audio research. These tables collected datasets suitable for environmental audio research at time when there was not many datasets available (before 2020). In addition to the freely available dataset, also proprietary and commercial datasets were listed here for completeness.

Environmental audio

The datasets are divided into two tables: Sound events table contains datasets suitable for research in the field of automatic sound event detection and automatic sound tagging. Acoustic scenes table contains datasets suitable for research involving the audio-based context recognition and acoustic scene classification.

Sound events

Provider Name Audio
type 		Data
source 		Acoustic scenes Annotation
type 		Context
count 		Event
classes 		Event
count 		Instances
per class 		Audio
files 		Mins Context
classes 		Licence Link Pub
Dares G1 Live Authors Mixed Events 28 761 3214 4.2 123 123 Free http://www.daresounds.org/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6637761;Mesaros2013a, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6616142;Mesaros2013b
Dares Amstel Live Authors Single Events 1 13 1002 77.1 40 54 train station Free http://www.daresounds.org/
Sound Ideas BBC Sound Effects Library Isolated Authors Mixed Description 0 0 1655 1655 0 Commercial http://www.sound-ideas.com/sound-effects/bbc-1-40-cds-sound-effects-library.html http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6269853;Kim2012a, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=8779081&jid=SIP&volumeId=1&issueId=-1&aid=8779080&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S2048770312000078;Kim2012b, http://sail.usc.edu/~malandra/files/papers/interspeech2013.pdf;Malandrakis2013
TUT CASA 2009 Live Authors Mixed Events 10 208 10326 49.6 103 1133 basketball game, beach, hallway, inside a bus, inside a car, office, restaurant, stadium with track and field event, street, supermarket Proprietary http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6639360;Heittola2013a, http://asmp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2013/1/1/abstract;Heittola2013b, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~heittolt/pubs/chime2011_heittola.pdf;Heittola2011, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~mesaros/pubs/plsa.pdf;Mesaros2011, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~mesaros/pubs/acoustic_event_detection_1406.pdf;Mesaros2010, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~heittolt/pubs/eusipco2010_heittola.pdf;Heittola2010
TUT CASA 2010 Live Authors Mixed Events 16 289 4173 14.4 160 535 Proprietary
ELRA CHIL 2007 Evaluation Package Live Authors Single Events 1 0 0 0 0 meeting room Commercial http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1092 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1840231;Zhuang2010
IEEE AASP Challenge 2013 Event isolated Isolated Authors Single Tags 1 16 639 39.9 320 19 office Free http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/description.html http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/;Results
IEEE AASP Challenge 2013 Event live Live Authors Single Events 1 16 205 12.8 3 5 office Free http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/description.html http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/;Results
IEEE AASP Challenge 2013 Event synthetic Live Authors Single Events 1 15 310 20.7 9 14 office Free http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/description.html http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/;Results
NII-SRC RWCP Sound Scene Database Isolated Authors Mixed Tags 0 14 9722 694.4 9722 0 Research and development use only http://www.openslr.org/13/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1035570;Nishiura2002, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00779-005-0045-4;Smith2006, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6637759;Dennis2013
QMUL Freefield1010 Live Freesound Mixed Tags 0 0 7690 7690 1282 Creative Commons http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/rdr/handle/123456789/35 http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5275;Stowell2014
INRIA NAR Isolated Authors Mixed Tags 4 41 42 1.0 852 8 Creative Commons https://team.inria.fr/perception/nard/ https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00768767/en;Janvier2014,https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00952092/en;Janvier2012
NYU UrbanSound Live Freesound Single Events 1 10 3075 307.5 1302 1620 street Creative Commons http://urbansounddataset.weebly.com/urbansound.html http://www.justinsalamon.com/uploads/4/3/9/4/4394963/salamon_urbansound_acmmm14.pdf;Salamon2014
NYU UrbanSound8K Live Freesound Street Tags 1 10 8732 873.2 8732 525 street Creative Commons http://urbansounddataset.weebly.com/urbansound8k.html http://www.justinsalamon.com/uploads/4/3/9/4/4394963/salamon_urbansound_acmmm14.pdf;Salamon2014
ELRA FBK-Irst database of isolated meeting-room acoustic events Isolated Authors Single Tags 1 16 576 36.0 288 63 meeting room Free http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1093 http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/pubs/CottonE11-spectrotemporal.pdf;Cotton2011
ELRA UPC-TALP database of isolated meeting-room acoustic events Live Authors Single Events 1 14 1026 73.3 3 0 meeting room Commercial http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1053
TU Dortmund Acoustic event dataset Isolated Authors Single Events 1 12 235 19.6 23 34 meeting room Free http://patrec.cs.tu-dortmund.de/files/icassp2014aed_dortmund.zip http://patrec.cs.tu-dortmund.de/pubs/papers/Plinge2014-BOF.pdf;Plinge2014
CICESE Sound Events Isolated Authors Single Tags 1 20 1367 68.3 1367 92 Free http://sound.natix.org/databases/allSounds.zip http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167865515002925;Beltran2015
MIVIA Audio Events Data Set for Surveillance Applications Live Authors Single Events 1 3 6000 2000.0 760 2279 Free http://mivia.unisa.it/datasets/audio-analysis/mivia-audio-events/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167865515001981;Foggia2015
MIVIA Audio Events Data Set for Road Surveillance Applications Live Authors Single Events 1 2 400 200.0 57 60 Free http://mivia.unisa.it/datasets/audio-analysis/mivia-road-audio-events-data-set/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6918643;Foggia2014
Freiburg Freiburg-106, Audio Data Set for Human Activity Recognition Live Authors Single Tags 1 24 1524 63.5 1524 54 kitchen Free http://www.csc.kth.se/~jastork/pages/datasets.html http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6343802;Stork2012, http://www.eurasip.org/Proceedings/Eusipco/Eusipco2015/papers/1570103447.pdf;Phan2015
ESC ESC-50 Live Freesound Mixed Tags 0 50 2000 40.0 2000 166 Free https://github.com/karoldvl/ESC-50 http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-Dataset.pdf;Piczak2015, http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-ConvNet.pdf;Piczak2015b
ESC ESC-10 Live Freesound Mixed Tags 0 10 400 40.0 400 33 Free https://github.com/karoldvl/ESC-10 http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-Dataset.pdf;Piczak2015, http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-ConvNet.pdf;Piczak2015b
ESC Dataset for Environmental Sound Classification Live Freesound Mixed Tags 0 50 2000 40.0 250000 20833 Free https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/YDEPUT http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-Dataset.pdf;Piczak2015a, http://karol.piczak.com/papers/Piczak2015-ESC-ConvNet.pdf;Piczak2015b
TUT TUT Sound events 2016, Development dataset Live Authors Mixed Events 2 18 954 53.0 22 78 home, residential area Free https://zenodo.org/record/45759
TU Dortmund Multi-channel acoustic event dataset Isolated Authors Single Events 1 20 437 21.9 37 90 conference room Free http://patrec.cs.tu-dortmund.de/files/datasets/dcase2016_multichannel-aed_dortmund.7z http://patrec.cs.tu-dortmund.de/pubs/papers/Kuerby2016-BAE;Kurby2016
TUT TUT-SED Synthetic 2016 Synthetic BBC Sound Effects Single Events 1 16 100 566 synthetic Free http://www.cs.tut.fi/sgn/arg/taslp2017-crnn-sed/tut-sed-synthetic-2016 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06286;Cakir2017,http://www.cs.tut.fi/~tuomasv/papers/end_to_end_sed_with_crnn_ijcnn_2018.pdf;Cakir2018
TUT TUT Sound events 2017, Development dataset Live Authors Mixed Events 2 6 729 121.5 24 92 street Free https://zenodo.org/record/400516
TUT TUT Rare sound events 2017, Development dataset Synthetic Freesound, TUT Acoustic scenes 2016 Single Events 1 3 1281 625 synthetic Free https://zenodo.org/record/401395#.W9muKlVfi7A
TUT TUT Rare sound events 2017, Evaluation dataset Synthetic Freesound, TUT Acoustic scenes 2016 Single Events 1 3 1500 1500.0 3000 1500 synthetic Free https://zenodo.org/record/1160455#.W9muM1Vfi7A
Google AudioSet Live Youtube Mixed Tags 632 2084320 3297.9 2084320 347386 Free https://research.google.com/audioset/ https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45857.html;Gemmeke2017
NYU URBAN-SED Synthetic Freesound Mixed Events 10 50000 5000.0 10000 1800 Free http://urbansed.weebly.com/ http://www.justinsalamon.com/uploads/4/3/9/4/4394963/salamon_scaper_waspaa_2017.pdf;Salamon2017
KU Leuven SINS database, DCASE 2018 task 5 development dataset Live Authors Home Tags 9 72984 8109.0 72984 12000 Free https://zenodo.org/record/1247102#.W9mjfFVfiEI http://dcase.community/documents/workshop2017/proceedings/DCASE2017Workshop_Dekkers_141.pdf;Dekkers2017
KU Leuven SINS database, DCASE 2018 task 5 evaluation dataset Live Authors Home Tags 9 72972 8108.0 72972 12000 Free https://zenodo.org/record/1291760#.W9mnelVfiEI http://dcase.community/documents/workshop2017/proceedings/DCASE2017Workshop_Dekkers_141.pdf;Dekkers2017
DCASE DCASE2017 task 4 development dataset Live Youtube Mixed Events, Tags 17 56737 3337.5 51660 8460.3 Youtube https://github.com/ankitshah009/Task-4-Large-scale-weakly-supervised-sound-event-detection-for-smart-cars
DCASE DCASE2017 task 4 evaluation dataset Live Youtube Mixed Events, Tags 17 1350 79.4 1103 183.8 Youtube http://dcase.community/challenge2017/task-large-scale-sound-event-detection#audio-dataset
ETH Acoustic Event Dataset Live Freesound Mixed Tags 28 5223 186.5 5223 768.4 Creative Commons https://data.vision.ee.ethz.ch/cvl/ae_dataset/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07160#;Takahashi2016
Data updated: 2019-04-23

Instructions to use the table

Sort the table by clicking headers. Select more fields to be shown from -menu. The table can be filtered by selection condition from the select boxes. Filtering can be cleared with -button. Numerical data is also shown in bar-chart. The chart can be hiden and shown from Chart-button. Pagination can be enabled and disabled with -button.

Notation

Audio type is denoted as follows:

  • Isolated, only one sound event is active per sample (no overlapping sounds).
  • Live, real recordings where overlapping sounds may be presents, start and end times annotated.

Annotation type is denoted as follows:

  • Sound Events, timestamps (onset and offset times) are indicated
  • Tags, sample-wide (usually one word or short) textual label
  • Description, sample-wide textual description of sounds / sound scene

License type is denoted as follows:

  • Free, free for academic usage (non-commercial), usually released under university specific EULA
  • Creative Commons, released under creative commons licence
  • Commercial, commercial license
  • Proprietary, dataset has not been published, but there is publications reporting results using it
  • Research and development use only

Acoustic scenes

Provider Name Context
count 		Audio
files 		Instances
per class 		Mins Context
classes 		Licence Link Pub
UEA Noise DB / Series 1 10 10 1.0 40 Free http://lemur.cmp.uea.ac.uk/Research/noise_db/ http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00779-005-0045-4;Smith2006
UEA Noise DB / Series 2 12 35 2.9 175 Free http://lemur.cmp.uea.ac.uk/Research/noise_db/ http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00779-005-0045-4;Smith2006
IEEE AASP Challenge 2013 Scene 10 100 10.0 50 Free http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/description.html http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/;Results
TUT CASA2009 10 103 10.3 1133 Proprietary http://www.cs.tut.fi/~heittolt/pubs/eusipco2010_heittola.pdf;Heittola2010
TUT CASA2010 13 160 12.3 533 Proprietary
TUT CASR 27 225 8.3 0 Proprietary http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1561288/;Eronen2006
Dares G1 28 123 4.4 123 Free http://www.daresounds.org/
Inria DEMAND 0 18 0.0 0 Creative Commons http://parole.loria.fr/DEMAND/
LITIS Rouen audio scene dataset 19 3026 159.3 1513 Free https://sites.google.com/site/alainrakotomamonjy/home/audio-scene http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6971128;Rakotomamonjy2015
TUT TUT Acoustic scenes 2016 Development dataset 15 1170 78.0 585 Free https://zenodo.org/record/45739 http://www.cs.tut.fi/~mesaros/pubs/mesaros_eusipco2016-dcase.pdf;Mesaros2016
TUT TUT Acoustic scenes 2016 Evaluation dataset 15 390 26.0 195 Free https://zenodo.org/record/165995 http://www.cs.tut.fi/~mesaros/pubs/mesaros_eusipco2016-dcase.pdf;Mesaros2016
TUT TUT Acoustic scenes 2017 Development dataset 15 4680 312.0 780 Free https://zenodo.org/record/400515 http://dcase.community/documents/workshop2017/proceedings/DCASE2017Workshop_Mesaros_100.pdf; Mesaros2017
TUT TUT Acoustic scenes 2017 Evaluation dataset 15 1620 108.0 270 Free https://zenodo.org/record/1040168 http://dcase.community/documents/workshop2017/proceedings/DCASE2017Workshop_Mesaros_100.pdf; Mesaros2017
AucoDefr07 AucoDefr07 4 16 63.0 252 Free https://archive.org/details/defreville-Aucouturier_urbanDb https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01082501v2;Lagrange2015
UCSD ExtraSensory Dataset 51 302177 0.0 0 Free http://extrasensory.ucsd.edu/~datasets/extrasensory/ http://extrasensory.ucsd.edu/~datasets/extrasensory/papers/vaizman2017a_pervasiveAcceptedVersion.pdf;Vaizman2017
TUT TUT Urban Acoustic Scenes 2018 Development dataset 10 8640 864.0 1440 Free https://zenodo.org/record/1228142 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.09840.pdf;Mesaros2018
TUT TUT Urban Acoustic Scenes 2018 Mobile Development dataset 10 10080 1008.0 1680 Free https://zenodo.org/record/1228235 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.09840.pdf;Mesaros2018
TUT/TAU TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2019 Development dataset 10 14400 1440.0 2400 Free https://zenodo.org/record/2589280
TUT/TAU TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2019 Mobile Development dataset 10 16560 1656.0 2760 Free https://zenodo.org/record/2589332
TUT/TAU TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2019 Openset, Development datase 14 15850 1440.0 2642 Free https://zenodo.org/record/2591503
Whisper/MERL WSJ0 Hipster Ambient Mixtures noise dataset (WHAM) 0 28000 28000.0 4800 Creative Commons https://storage.googleapis.com/whisper-public/wham_noise.zip https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01160.pdf;Wichern2019
Data updated: 2019-07-09

Online services

Isolated sounds

Geotagged recordings

Related datasets

  • Speech Datasets, ISCA Special Interest Group on Robust Speech Recognition

Libraries

Free sound effect libraries by commercial provider:

Tools

Annotation tools

Software

  • Audacity, audio software with basic annotation capabilities. Use label tracks for the annotations, see more info here.
  • Audio Labeler App in Matlab, Audio annotation tool introduced in Matlab version R2018b.
  • Audio Annotator, Javascript web interface for annotating audio data.
  • ELAN, a linguistic annotation tool to create the textual annotations for audio and video files

Prototypes

Audio management tools

  • Pumilio, a Web-Based Management System for Ecological Recordings

Audio augmentation tools