This is the audio data of saxophone trills, used for difficulty estimation in the paper "Modeling the difficulty of saxophone music" by Šimon Libřický and Jan Hajič jr., ISMIR 2025.

The dataset consists of recordings of saxophone trills played at the maximum attainable speed under some quality conditions (most importantly: stable intonation) split into individual sessions. Five different saxophone players (all approximately at the level of conservatory students) recorded trills for all intervals available on the tenor saxophone. The trill speeds are then used as inputs into a difficulty estimation model, with the assumption that intervals with lower attainable trill speeds are harder to play (e.g., larger leaps, or those that require re-using the same finger for a different key). There is a total of 817 recorded trills. Six "anchor" intervals were recorded in each of the 13 sessions, so that the players can be compared, making the total number of distinct recorded trills 745.

If you use this dataset, please cite:

Libřický, Šimon and Hajič jr., Jan (2025). "Modeling the difficulty of saxophone music." In: Proceedings of the 26th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Daejeon, Republic of Korea, Sep 2025.