A music notation construction engine for optical music recognition

  • Authors:
  • David Bainbridge;Tim Bell

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand;Department of Computer Science, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Optical music recognition (OMR) systems are used to convert music scanned from paper into a format suitable for playing or editing on a computer. These systems generally have two phases: recognizing the graphical symbols (such as note-heads and lines) and determining the musical meaning and relationshipsof the symbols (such as the pitch and rhythm of the notes). In this paper we explore the second phase and give a two-step approach that admits an economical representation of the parsing rules for the system. The approach is flexible and allows the system to be extended to new notations with little effort--the current system can parse common music notation, Sacred Harp notation and plainsong. It is based on a string grammar and a customizable graph that specifies relationships between musical objects. We observe that this graph can be related to printing as well as recognizing music notation, bringing the opportunity for cross-fertilization between the two areas of research.