For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, which we refer to as Optical Music Recognition. However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: few introductory materials are available, and furthermore the field has struggled with defining itself…
Getting started with OMR
During ISMIR 2018, Ichiro Fujinaga, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Jan Hajič jr., and Alexander Pacha gave a tutorial that was recorded and is available on our YouTube Channel. Icons on this website made by Freepik from http://www.flaticon.com are licensed by CC 3.0 BY.
What is Optical Music Recognition?
Optical Music Recognition is the research field that investigates how the computer can read music scores.
musicdiff: a general-purpose music notation diff tool
musicdiff is a file format agnostic music file diff tool that compares two music scores, and produces a rendered PDF of each score, visually marked up with descriptive text and colored notes, pointing out the differences. It is focused on notational (visual) differences rather than only audible differences. This can be very useful for visualization…
WoRMS 2021 Videos Online
In case you missed this year’s edition of WoRMS 2021 in Alicante, there are good news for you. All presentations have been recorded in Zoom and available on YouTube in our Optical Music Recognition Channel.
Assessing PlayScore
End of August the German computer magazine c’t published a thorough review of programs that digitize sheet music (18/2019, page 122-126). The three programs that achieved ‘good recognition’ were PhotoScore, SharpEye, and SmartScore with a reported 98% accuracy – the same programs that did well in the review that c’t published in 2001! PlayScore was…
Dissertation “Self-Learning OMR”
In this post, Alexander Pacha shares his thesis, as well as the recording of the defense.
Introduction to MUSCIMA++
In this video, Jan Hajič jr. introduces the MUSCIMA++ dataset and explains how it can be used to solve OMR.
Assessments for slurs/ties and for articulations
When I wrote the first blog post about assessments about a month ago, I noted that OMR products had trouble with slurs and articulations. So an assessment of both seems very useful! Let us have a look at the following stave: One of the OMR outputs looked like this: The assessment is fairly straight-forward: a slur…
Assessments without MusicXML
In the last weeks, I have shown how a note/rest assessment works for OMR systems that supports MusicXML as an output. There are of course OMR systems in development that do not support MusicXML and may not be able to process a full page. How can the note/rest assessment handle such situations? To address this,…
Assessments of results containing added measures
When OMR systems add additional measures, it is a problem for automated assessments. Can it still be done?
Short update to automated assessments
Evaluating scores on the note level is the first step towards automated assessments. In this blog post, I’ll take a look at how this can be done.
OMR Research 