| | Category | CS | P08 | Optical Music Recognition of Printed Music Score |
| | Abstract | Computer vision is one of the most interesting areas in Computer |
| | Science. For many musicologists, manually encoding musical information is |
| | expensive and time consuming. Since the 1950s, researchers have |
| | attempted to turn sheet music into digitized files through the use of a |
| | computer. There has been progress and success in Optical Character |
| | Recognition (OCR) to the point it can be used commercially. However, |
| | Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has been studied since late 1959 but its |
| | success has been minor compared to that of OCR. Difficulty of OMR has |
| | deterred researchers from further research. Nonetheless, OMR can be |
| | just as efficient as OCR and is a promising tool for musicians and |
| | musicologists. Some of the benefits of OMR are listed. |
| | |
| | 1. Read in a score of music and then play it out, using an appropriate |
| | audio-music-producing program. |
| | 2. Read existing score to transfer the data to storage or transmission |
| | media. |
| | 3. Read in a newly engraved piece of music and proofread it for |
| | syntactic and other errors. |
| | |
| | For the project, Mathematica 8 was used to implement and test |
| | algorithms. Eight pages of Mozart’s “String Quintet in B-flat Major, K. 174” |
| | score were scanned in full 300 dots per inch (dpi) at full page mode and |
| | with 1 bit per pixel. To optimize performance, they were saved as TIFF |
| | (Tagged Image File Format) in a 2550 by 3300 pixel format. After importing |
| | them to Mathematica, each page was cut into individual measures using |
| | segmentation techniques. Using pattern recognition techniques, various |
| | types of annotations like notes and rests were assigned sounds. ASCII file |
| | was used as an intermediate to store information like pitches, duration, |
| | and note names. Then, the file was converted to MIDI file format, which |
| | could be played on Windows Media Player. |
| | |
| | This experiment was attempted to read printed music scores using |
| | existing pattern recognition algorithms on Mathematica 8. The emphasis |
| | was on using more efficient methods such as projection matching and size |
| | classification, rather than brute force ones such as pattern matching. |
| | Although many improvements are still needed to make a general OMR |
| | system, the benefit of OMR is enormous. With electronic synthesizer |
| | sound coming closer to real instruments, OMR can bring full orchestra |
| | sound to a composer from a conceptual stage and also make it easier for |
| | composers to have their music printed. Musicologists can concentrate on |
| | their research rather than wasting time inputting the data into the |
| | computer. |
| | |
| | Bibliography | 1) http://www.npcimaging.com/thesis/Chap1.html 2) |
| | http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/84 3) http://www.jstor.org/pss/832471 |