Catalog series

West African Rhythms

Rights-cleared, articulation-level recordings of West African drums, strings, and idiophones, from djembe tone and slap to kora and balafon, captured as controllable acoustic primitives for audio AI.

6 instruments Reference Sessions

Why this series matters

West African music is built from stroke vocabularies and interlocking parts: djembe bass, tone, and slap, the pitch bends of the talking drum, and the layered patterns of kora and balafon. General-purpose training data rarely captures these in isolation. This series is designed to make those controls learnable, not merely present.

Stroke vocabulary

Interlocking rhythm

Articulation-level capture

Provenance-first

What makes it hard to capture

Performers fluent in traditional repertoire and technique
Fast transients and wide dynamics from hand drums, rattles, and resonators
Pitch that shifts within a single stroke on the talking drum
Metadata that reflects stroke and pattern logic, not generic tags

What the series includes

Articulation-level datasets for each instrument: isolated notes, ornaments, and techniques, individually labeled
Reference Sessions: ensemble performances delivered as dry stems, processed stems, and the finished mix, in traditional and contemporary arrangements

Typical use cases

Stroke-level percussion classification and generation
Groove modeling across interlocking parts
Transient-accurate drum and idiophone synthesis
Evaluating how models handle polyrhythm

Provenance and annotation

Every dataset is documented under the Proteus Standard™: source provenance for each file, written rights assignment from every performer, and per-file SHA-256 checksums with licensed data.

Orpheus annotation is available as an optional layer for teams that need human-aligned control vocabularies.

Previews and licensing

Each dataset starts with a free preview on Hugging Face. Full datasets are licensed at the Research, Startup, or Enterprise tier, and HFA also produces commissioned datasets to a buyer's specification.

Discuss licensing Browse datasets

Datasets in this series

Select a dataset to view its details and preview.

Balafon

IN PRODUCTION

Isolated balafon notes and runs for modeling wooden-bar tone, gourd resonance, and buzz.

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West African Rhythms

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IN PRODUCTION