The "OpenScore String Quartet" Corpus

The "OpenScore String Quartet" Corpus is a new dataset of historic works for string quartets, encoded by a dedicated team of volunteers, and released freely for all use cases (CC0). In creating this corpus, we built on the experience amassed during the 'OpenScore Lieder Corpus' (Gotham and Jonas, MEC 2021), however, the quartets presented some additional challenges including the need for more significant editorial intervention. Here we report on the size and contents of the corpus (more than 100 full quartets by over 40 composers), we discuss the editorial-musicological aspects of producing modern playing scores from ambiguous or incomplete source material, and we suggest some prospective use cases for this dataset in music information retrieval (MIR).