JSMel: A dataset of 960 song melodies widely shared in contemporary Japan

Across music-related research fields such as music psychology, music information processing, and musicology, much research has focused on the musical environment of Western Europe and North America. In contrast, datasets representing the musical environments of non-Western cultures remain highly limited; however, such resources are necessary for advancing cross-cultural research in music-related research fields. The present study provides a large-scale dataset of song melodies that have remained widely familiar and beloved in contemporary Japan over the past three to four decades. The dataset comprises 960 songs beloved in Japan. For each song, the melody was extracted and represented by two symbolic sequences: a pitch sequence representing note pitches (with octave information) and a duration sequence representing note and rest values relative to a quarter note.