Music OCR is the application of optical character recognition

OCR

OCR may refer to:* Optical character recognition, conversion of images of text into characters** The OCR-A font, designed to simplify character recognition** The similar OCR-B font* Transvaginal oocyte retrieval, a technique used in in vitro fertilization...

 to interpret sheet music

Sheet music

Sheet music is a hand-written or printed form of music notation that uses modern musical symbols; like its analogs—books, pamphlets, etc.—the medium of sheet music typically is paper , although the access to musical notation in recent years includes also presentation on computer screens...

 or printed scores into editable and, often, playable form. Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. MIDI (for playback) and MusicXML

MusicXML

MusicXML is an open, XML-based music notation file format.It was developed by Recordare LLC, deriving several key concepts from existing academic formats . It is designed for the interchange of scores, particularly between different scorewriters.Version 1.0 was released in January 2004...

 (for page layout).

History

Early research into recognition of printed sheet music was performed at the graduate level in the late 1960s at MIT and other institutions.
Successive efforts were made to localize and remove musical staff lines leaving symbols to be recognized and parsed. The first commercial music-scanning product, MIDISCAN, was released in 1991 by Musitek

SmartScore

SmartScore is a music OCR and scorewriter program, developed, published and distributed by Musitek Corporation based in Ojai, California, . As of March 2010, there are over 35,000 registered users of Musitek software worldwide....

 corporation.

Unlike OCR of text, where words are parsed sequentially, music notation involves parallel elements, as when several voices are present along with unattached performance symbols positioned nearby. Therefore, the spatial relationship between notes, expression marks, dynamics, articulations and other annotations is an important part of the expression of the music.

Modern music OCR packages have accuracy exceeding 99% when a clean scan is used and the notation is not exceptional (e.g. unfilled voices, non-standard symbology, etc.). Because music notation utilizes dots for staccato marks or to extend the value of a note, artifacts in the scan can lead to interpretation problems.

Proprietary software

• capella-scan
• PhotoScore (used in Sibelius
  Sibelius notation program
  Sibelius is a scorewriter program, created by Sibelius Software for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and RISC OS. It is used by composers, arrangers, performers, music publishers, teachers and students, particularly for writing classical, jazz, band, vocal, film and television music...
  
  )
• ScoreMaker
• SharpEye
• SmartScore
  SmartScore
  SmartScore is a music OCR and scorewriter program, developed, published and distributed by Musitek Corporation based in Ojai, California, . As of March 2010, there are over 35,000 registered users of Musitek software worldwide....
  
   SmartScore Lite is used in Finale. Formerly packaged as "MIDISCAN"
• VivaldiScan
• MusicReader

Free/Open Source Software

• Audiveris (Java) (last release 2010)
• OpenOMR (Java)
  OpenOMR (Java)
  OpenOMR is an open source optical music recognition tool written in Java for printed music scores. It allows a user to scan a printed music partition and play it through the computer speakers. It is being published as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License ....
  
  (last release 2006)

External links

• Optical Music Recognition (OMR): Programs and scientific papers
• Optical Music Recognition Bibliography: A comprehensive list of papers published in OMR.