'Universidad de Alicante Servicio de Publicaciones'
Abstract
Digital symbolic music scores offer many benefits compared to paper-based scores, such as a flexible dynamic layout that allows adjustments of size and style, intelligent navigation features, automatic page-turning, on-the-fly modifications of the score including transposition into a different key, and rule-based annotations that can save hours of manual work by automatically highlighting relevant aspects in the score. However, most musicians still rely on paper because they don’t have access to a digital version of their sheet music, or their digital solution does not provide a satisfying experience. To bring digital scores to millions of musicians, we at Enote are building a mobile application that offers a comprehensive digital library of sheet music. These scores are obtained by a large-scale Optical Music Recognition process, combined with metadata collection and curation. Our material is stored in the MEI format and we rely on Verovio as a central component of our app to present scores and parts dynamically on mobile devices. This combination of the expressiveness of MEI with the beautiful engraving of Verovio allows us to create a flexible, mobile solution that we believe to be a powerful and true alternative to paper scores with practical features like smart annotations or instant transpositions. We also invest heavily into the open-source development of Verovio to make it the gold standard for rendering beautiful digital sheet music
