  It is very important to access a rich music dataset that is useful in a wide
variety of applications. Currently, available datasets are mostly focused on
storing vocal or instrumental recording data and ignoring the requirement of
its visual representation and retrieval. This paper attempts to build an
XML-based public dataset, called SANGEET, that stores comprehensive information
of Hindustani Sangeet (North Indian Classical Music) compositions written by
famous musicologist Pt. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande. SANGEET preserves all the
required information of any given composition including metadata, structural,
notational, rhythmic, and melodic information in a standardized way for easy
and efficient storage and extraction of musical information. The dataset is
intended to provide the ground truth information for music information research
tasks, thereby supporting several data-driven analysis from a machine learning
perspective. We present the usefulness of the dataset by demonstrating its
application on music information retrieval using XQuery, visualization through
Omenad rendering system. Finally, we propose approaches to transform the
dataset for performing statistical and machine learning tasks for a better
understanding of Hindustani Sangeet. The dataset can be found at
https://github.com/cmisra/Sangeet.
