# Monophonic Corpus of Complete Compositions The [Monophonic Corpus of Complete Compositions](https://osf.io/5muwn/) (MCCC) is a corpus containing [623](https://osf.io/9ugy5/) monophonic melody lines extracted in their entirety from Western classical tonal compositions. Compositions are notated in the Humdrum [**kern](https://www.humdrum.org/guide/ch02/) data format. The corpus was created for the modelling of large-scale structures in music, requiring full length works that keep such structures intact. The corpus consists of three categories of composition: 1. Those (a relatively small number) originally composed for a single-stave instrument and so already monophonic in nature. 2. Piano works to which a skyline algorithm was applied to extract the uppermost line. 3. Works for solo instrument with accompaniment, from which the solo was used and any large gaps were filled by a skyline of the upper accompanying line. The corpus contains 623 works—or self-contained work movements—with composition dates spanning from 1703 to 1934, encompassing Western styles from Baroque to Early Twentieth-Century, illustrated in the figure below. Due to the nature of the constraints on the curation of the corpus, the database contains some inherent biases. A bias exists towards particular instrumentations, and so influences towards certain genres. As a result of the selection process, all works included were originally composed for either one or two instruments, no pieces for a larger ensemble are present; the corpus, therefore, is confined to chamber music genres. ---------- ***Note:** As the monophonic lines are extracted based on a small number of computational rules, it is not necessarily the case that the items of the corpus contain the best melodic representation for their original works. Also, this may also result in some of the items being a little rough round the edges.* ---------- @[osf](y534m) ---------- ## Corpus Naming All piece description labels and genre/style classifications are take from their [IMSLP](https://imslp.org/) entries, and **items are named by their IMSLP I-Catalogue Number** and movement number. *For example:* `IJB0063_01.krn` **J. S. Bach**, *Cello Suite No. 1*, first movement `I_________` — Prefix to all items `_JB_______` — Composer initials `___0063___` — A unique ID number for that work, assigned based on initial order of IMSLP (not intended to be chronological) `________01` — Movement or work sub-part number (`00` when no sub-part) A list of all compositions in the corpus, as well as descriptive information can be found in the [`corpus_datasheet.csv`](https://osf.io/9ugy5/) file.