Optical music recognition

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a field of research that investigates how to computationally read music notation in documents. The goal of OMR is to teach the computer to read and interpret sheet music and produce a machine-readable version of the written music score. Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. MIDI (for playback) and MusicXML (for page layout). Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a field of research that investigates how to computationally read music notation in documents. The goal of OMR is to teach the computer to read and interpret sheet music and produce a machine-readable version of the written music score. Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. MIDI (for playback) and MusicXML (for page layout). In the past it has, misleadingly, also been called Music OCR. Due to significant differences, this term should no longer be used. Research into the automatic recognition of printed sheet music started in the late 1960s at MIT when the first image scanners became affordable for research institutes. Due to memory restrictions of the used computers, the first attempts were limited to only a few measures of music (see first published scan of music). In 1984, a Japanese research group from Waseda University developed a specialized robot, called WABOT (WAseda roBOT), which was capable of reading the music sheet in front of it and accompanying a singer on an electric organ.