The MPB Corpus: A Dataset of Melody, Rhythm, Harmony, and Melody–Harmony Relationships in Brazilian Popular Music
References
- Almada, C. (2022). A harmonia de Jobim. Editora da Unicamp. 10.7476/9788526816480. (In Portuguese)
- Almada, C. (2023a). A melodia de Jobim. Editora da Unicamp. (In Portuguese)
- Almada, C. (2023b). Musical variation: Toward a transformational perspective. Springer. 10.1007/978-3-031-31451-3.
- Almada, C., Carvalho, H., and Martins, F. (2026). MPB Corpus (Version 1.1) [Data set]. Zenodo
https://zenodo.org/records/22737013 . - Cambouropoulos, E., Kaliakatsos‑Papakostas, M., and Tsougras, C. (2014). An idiom‑independent representation of chords for computational music analysis and generation. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Association Conference. International Computer Music Association.
- Cano, E., Mora‑Ángel, F., Gil, G. A. L., Zapata, J. R., Escamilla, A., Alzate, J. F., and Betancur, M. (2021). Sesquialtera in the Colombian bambuco: Perception and estimation of beat and meter (Extended version). Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 4(1), 248–262. 10.5334/tismir.118.
- Carvalho, H. T., Martins, F. D., and de L. Almada, C. (2025). A corpus study of rhythm in Brazilian popular music. In Proceedings of the 1st Latin American Music Information Retrieval Workshop (LAMIR) (pp. 14–18).
- Castro, R. (2015). A noite do meu bem: A história e as histórias do samba‑canção. Companhia das Letras. (In Portuguese).
- Chediak, A. (1989). Songbook Caetano Veloso. Irmãos Vitale. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8574072834, 8574073377).
- Chediak, A. (1992). Songbook Gilberto Gil. Irmãos Vitale. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8574072664, 8574073512).
- Chediak, A. (1997). Songbook Edu Lobo. Lumiar. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8585426306).
- Chediak, A. (2000). Songbook Ivan Lins. Irmãos Vitale. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8574074160, 8574074985).
- Chediak, A. (2003). Songbook João Bosco. Irmãos Vitale. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8574073253, 8574073210, 8574074373).
- Chediak, A. (2009). Songbook Rita Lee. Irmãos Vitale. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8574072540, 8574073776).
- Davies, M. E. P., Fuentes, M., Fonseca, J., Aly, L., Jerónimo, M., and Baraldi, F. B. (2020). Moving in time: Computational analysis of microtiming in maracatu de baque solto. In Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR).
- deClercq, T., and Temperley, D. (2011). A corpus analysis of rock harmony. Popular Music, 30(1). 10.1017/s026114301000067x.
- Dowling, W. J. (1978). Scale and contour: Two components of a theory of memory for melodies. Psychological Review, 85(4), 341–354. 10.1037/0033-295x.85.4.341.
- Faour, R. (2021). História da música popular brasileira. Record. (In Portuguese).
- Fonseca, J., Fuentes, M., Bonini Baraldi, F., and Davies, M. E. P. (2021).
On the use of automatic onset detection for the analysis of maracatu de baque solto . In L. Correia Castilho, R. Dias and J. F. Pinho (Eds.), Perspectives on music, sound and musicology (Vol. 10). Springer. 10.1007/978-3-030-78451-5_11. - Frisch, W. (1984). Brahms and the principle of developing variation. University of California Press. 10.1525/9780520352322.
- Gómez‑Marín, D., Ospina‑Caicedo, R., Díaz‑Cely, J., Paz, J., Jordà, S., and Herrera, P. (2024). Salsa, a dataset for beat estimation in salsa music. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 7(1), 264–273. 10.5334/tismir.183.
- Gonda, J. (1971–1972). Problems of tonality and function in modern jazz improvisation. Jazzforschung / Jazz Research. 3/4.
- Good, P. (2005). Permutation, parametric and bootstrap tests of hypotheses (3rd ed.). Springer. 10.1007/b138696.
- Hamilton, M., and Pearce, M. (2024). Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on US charts from 1950 to 2023. Scientific Reports, 14(1). 10.1038/s41598-024-64571-x.
- Hunke, T., Huber, F., and Steffens, J. (2025). The evolution of song lyrics: An NLP‑based analysis of popular music in Germany from 1954 to 2022. Music & Science, 8. 10.1177/20592043251331155.
- Huron, D. (1988). Error categories, detection, and reduction in a musical database. Computers and the Humanities, 22(1). 10.1007/bf00118601.
- Huron, D. (2013). On the virtuous and vexatious in the age of big data. Music Perception, 31(3). 10.1525/mp.2013.31.1.4.
- Jobim, A. C. (2005). Cancioneiro Jobim: Obras completas (5 vols.). Jobim Music. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8588757095, 8588757087, 858875715X, 8587220209, 8588757168).
- Lerdahl, F., and Jackendoff, J. (1983). A generative theory of tonal music. The MIT Press. 10.7551/mitpress/12513.001.0001.
- Lin, J. (1991). Divergence measures based on the Shannon entropy. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 37(1), 145–151. 10.1109/18.61115.
- Lopes, W., and Lima, B. (2015). Songbook Milton Nascimento. Letramento. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8568620051)
- Maia, L. S., de Tomaz, Junior., D, P., Fuentes, M., Rocamora, M., Biscainho, L. W. P., Costa, do V. M. da., M, and Cohen, S. (2018). A novel dataset of brazilian rhythmic instruments and some experiments in computational rhythm analysis. In Memorias del Congreso Latinoamericano de Ingeniería de Audio de la AES (pp. 53–60). 10.5281/zenodo.14051323.
- Maia, L. S., Fuentes, M., Biscainho, L. W. P., Rocamora, M., and Essid, S. (2019). Sambaset: A dataset of historical samba de enredo recordings for computational music analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. 10.5281/zenodo.3527888.
- Maia, L. S., Rocamora, M., Biscainho, L. W. P., and Fuentes, M. (2024). Selective annotation of few data for beat tracking of Latin American music using rhythmic features. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 7(1), 99–112. 10.5334/tismir.170.
- Mauch, M., MacCallum, R., Levy, M., and Leroi, A. (2015). The evolution of popular music: USA 1960‑2010. Royal Society Open Science, 2(5). 10.1098/rsos.150081.
- Moss, F., Souza, W. F., and Rohrmeier, M. (2020). Harmony and form in Brazilian Choro: A corpus‑driven approach to musical style analysis. Journal of New Music Research, 49(5). 10.1080/09298215.2020.1797109.
- Parsons, M. (1975). The directory of tunes and musical patterns. A‑R Editions.
- Rocamora, M., Jure, L., Marenco, B., Fuentes, M., Lanzaro, F., and Gómez, A. (2015). An audio‑visual database of candombe performances for computational musicological studies. In Proceedings of the 2do. Congreso Internacional de Ciencia y Tecnología Musical (CICTeM 2015). 10.5281/zenodo.3647666.
- Sandroni, C. (2001). Feitiço decente. Zahar/UFRJ. (In Portuguese).
- Schoenberg, A. (1975). Style and idea. University of California Press.
- Serrà, J., Álvaro, C., Boguñá, M., Haro, M., and Arcos, J. L. (2012). Measuring the evolution of contemporary Western popular music. Scientific Reports, 2(521). 10.1038/srep00521.
- Severiano, J. (2022). Uma história da música popular brasileira: Das origens à modernidade (5th ed., Vol. 34). Editora. (In Portuguese).
- Severiano, J., and de Mello, Z. H. (2015a). A canção no tempo: 85 anos de músicas brasileiras (7th ed., Vol. 1, Vol. 34, pp. 1901–1957). Editora. (In Portuguese).
- Severiano, J., and de Mello, Z. H. (2015b). A canção no tempo: 85 anos de músicas brasileiras (7th ed., Vol. 2, Vol. 34, pp. 1958–1985). Editora. (In Portuguese).
- Snyder, R. (2001). Music and memory: An introduction. The MIT Press.
- Sukman, H., and Gilly, R. (2020). A Música de Djavan. Luanda Edições. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8561342013, 8561342021, 856134203X).
- Tymoczko, D. (2011). A geometry of music: Harmony and counterpoint in the extended common practice. Oxford University Press.
- White, C. (2022). The music in the data: Corpus analysis, music analysis, and tonal traditions. Routledge. 10.4324/9781003285663.
- White, C., and Quinn, I. (2018). Chord context and harmonic function in tonal music. Music Theory Spectrum, 40(2). 10.1093/mts/mty021.
- Windholz, M. O., Sears, D. R. W., and Moss, F. C. (2026). Harmonic patterns in Brazilian choro: A data‑driven comparison with Western classical and anglophone popular music. MusMat: Brazilian Journal of Music and Mathematics, 10, 54–71. 10.46926/musmat.2026v10.54-71.
- Zappa, R. (2018). Cancioneiro Chico. Jobim Music. (In Portuguese; ISBN: 8588757249, 8588757257, 8588757265).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.357 | Journal eISSN: 2514-3298
Language: English
Page range: 565 - 587
Submitted on: Nov 22, 2025
Accepted on: Aug 24, 2026
Published on: Oct 14, 2026
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
© 2026 Carlos de L. Almada, Hugo T. de Carvalho, Felipe D. Martins, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.