The Florence Price Art Song Dataset and Piano Accompaniment Generator

Abstract

Florence B. Price was a composer in the early 20th century whose music reflects her upbringing in the American South, her African heritage, and her Western classical training. She is noted as the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Her music has recently received renewed attention from both the public and the research community, decades after her death. In addition to other genres, Price was a prolific composer for solo voice and piano. Music historians have documented the existence of 134 art songs and piano/voice arrangements for spirituals and folk songs written by Price. We release a digital catalog of 112 of these works in MuseScore, MusicXML, MIDI, and PDF format. We also use this dataset to fine-tune a symbolic music generation model to generate accompaniments to melodies, and we conduct a blind listening experiment that shows that accompaniments generated by our model are perceived as being reflective of Florence Price's style more frequently than accompaniments generated by a baseline model. We release our model as the Florence Price Piano Accompaniment Generator alongside our dataset.