Integrated recognition system for music scores

Abstract

Many music works produced in the last century still exist only as original manuscripts or as photocopies. Preserving them entails their digitalization and consequent accessibility in a digital format easy-to-manage which encourages browsing, retrieval, search and analysis while providing a generalized access to the digital material. The manual process to carry out this task is very time consuming and error prone. Automatic optical music recognition (OMR) has emerged as a partial solution to this problem. However, the full potential of this process only reveals itself when integrated in a system that provides seamless access to browsing, retrieval, search and analysis. We address this demand by proposing a modular, flexible and scalable framework that fully integrates the abovementioned functionalities. A web based system to carry out the automatic recognition process, allowing the creation and management of a music corpus, while providing generalized access to it, is a unique and innovative approach to the problem. A prototype has been implemented and is being used as a test platform for OMR algorithms.