Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). 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 and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

Sampling the past:a tactile approach to interactive musical instrument exhibits in the heritage sector

In the last decade, the heritage sector has had to adapt to a shifting cultural landscape of public expectations and attitudes towards ownership and intellectual property. One way it has done this is to focus on each visitor’s encounter and provide them with a sense of experiential authenticity.There is a clear desire by the public to engage with music collections in this way, and a sound museological rationale for providing such access, but the approach raises particular curatorial problems, specifically how do we meaningfully balance access with the duty to preserve objects for future generations?This paper charts the development of one such project. Based at Fenton House in Hampstead, and running since 2008, the project seeks to model digitally the keyboard instruments in the Benton Fletcher Collection and provide a dedicated interactive exhibit, which allows visitors to view all of the instruments in situ, and then play them through a custom-built two-manual MIDI controller with touch-screen interface.We discuss the approach to modelling, which uses high-definition sampling, and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the exhibit as it currently stands, with particular focus on its key shortcoming: at present, there is no way to effectively model the key feel of a historic keyboard instrument.This issue is of profound importance, since the feel of any instrument is fundamental to its character, and shapes the way performers relate to it. The issue is further compounded if we are to consider a single dedicated keyboard as being the primary mode of interface for several instrument models of different classes, each with its own characteristic feel.We conclude by proposing an outline solution to this problem, detailing early work on a real-time adaptive haptic keyboard interface that changes its action in response to sampled resistance curves, measured on a key-by-key basis from the original instruments

Archimorphosis

International audienc

Heuristic and supervised approaches to handwritten annotation extraction for musical score images

Performers' copies of musical scores are typically rich in handwritten annotations, which capture historical and institutional performance practices. The development of rich, interactive interfaces to explore digital archives of these scores and the systematic investigation of their meaning and function will be facilitated by the automatic extraction of handwritten score annotations. We present several approaches to the extraction of handwritten annotations of arbitrary content from digitized images of musical scores. First, we show promising results in certain contexts when using simple unsupervised clustering techniques to identify handwritten annotations in conductors' scores. Next, we compare annotated scores to unannotated copies and use a printed sheet music comparison tool, Aruspix, to recover handwritten annotations as additions to the clean copy. Using both of these techniques in a combined annotation pipeline qualitatively improves the recovery of handwritten annotations. Recent work has shown the effectiveness of reframing classical optical musical recognition tasks as supervised machine learning classification tasks. In the same spirit, we pose the problem of handwritten annotation extraction as a supervised pixel classification task, where the feature space for the learning task is derived from the intensities of neighboring pixels. After an initial investment of time required to develop dependable training data, this approach can reliably extract annotations for entire volumes of score images without further supervision. These techniques are demonstrated using a sample of orchestral scores annotated by professional conductors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Handwritten annotation extraction in musical scores has applications to the systematic investigation of score annotation practices by performers, annotator attribution, and to the interactive presentation of annotated scores, which we briefly discuss

On the critical editing of Electronic and Mixed Music. Historical matters and new perspectives

Today, the sources of electronic and mixed music produced in the XXth century by analog means have entered the digital documentary domain. Therefore, the theoretical reflection on the ethics of preservation, restoration and re-issue of audiovisual documents cannot ignore the models of communication engineering: encodeing and decoding, audio signal processing \u2013 also implemented in the World Wide Web today \u2013 are of paramount importance. After World War II, a new musical research was born within the context of acoustical and electro-acoustical communication systems and it found a privileged thread in the Theory of Information. In the world of electronic and mixed music the technological system is an integral part of the compositional project, and the audio tracks represent a \u2018projection\u2019 of the production project. Audio recordings deliver to the editor an essential evidence for reconstructing the technical and theoretical world of the composers, which is to say their pre-post-history. In this paper, the meta-conceptual role of Information and Communication Theory is historized and it becomes an integral part of a systemic method for the restitution of the electronic musical work. With a wide range of examples (including works by Edgard Vare\u300se, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Ge\u301rard Grisey) we show peculiarities and issues of the critical editing of this repertoire

Archives, Access and Artificial Intelligence: Working with Born-Digital and Digitized Archival Collections

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets

Archives, Access and Artificial Intelligence

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets

Pastime with Good Company: The Songs of Henry VIII and His Daughter Elizabeth I

The purpose of this study is to document the surviving musical compositions of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The repositories in London containing each monarch’s remaining body of musical work were examined and the compositions themselves studied. Research was conducted to give further details about each document and its history within the Tudor monarchs’ lives