Music Information Lab: 253/CS 275A)
SharpEye Music Scanning


SharpEye is an optical music recognition program which has an interactive graphical environment for editing the symbolic music notation extracted from scanned music.

Start SharpEye by clicking on the taskbar icon which looks like a sharp wholenote: . Music can be scanned directly from SharpEye using the "Aquire" option in the File menu, or you can scan with a separate program and choose "Open Image" option in the File menu to load the graphic music.

Links:

http://www.visiv.co.uk
Homepage for SharpEye.

http://www.visiv.co.uk/about.htm
A brief description of SharpEye.

http://www.visiv.co.uk/manualv2.pdf
SharpEye Manual (in PDF format).

http://www.visiv.co.uk/L2SDKdoc.htm
Documentation for the Liszt music-OCR engine which runs behind the scenes in the SharpEye graphical user interface.

http://www.visiv.co.uk/tech-mro.htm
Internal data format used in SharpEye.
http://www.recordare.com/xml.html
Description of MusicXML.

http://www.recordare.com/xml.html
Description of MusicXML.

http://dkc.jhu.edu/gamera
Gamera: A software framework for the creation of domain-specific recognition applications. Music OCR being one application.

http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/gamera/demo
Demonstration of Gamera operating on the Levy Sheet Music collection at Johns Hopkins Unversity.

Exercises

  1. Become familiar with the basic SharpEye scanning process by following these instructions:

    Download a TIFF image of an example page of music by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right, or print out the PDF version of the music and scan into SharpEye (or use a stand-alone scanning program to scan).

    Load the graphic image into SharpEye and convert to symbolic notation.

    Play the converted music inside of SharpEye.

    Save the music as MusicXML data.

    Import the Music into Finale using the Plugin menu for MusicXML Import.

    Print the converted music from Finale.

  2. Compare the original PDF file and the version of the music printed by Finale. What aspects of the music were preserved? Which were lost? How is the spacing different in the two examples? Does MusicXML encode musical spacing?

  3. Convert a page of music from the American Sheet Music collection at the Library of Congress (memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmhome.html) into a symbolic score using SharpEye. Note: download the bitonal TIFF files for use in SharpEye since the lower resolution grayscale GIF images will not be good enough to convert in SharpEye.

    For extra credit, convert an entire piece from the Library of Congress website into symbolic music notation using SharpEye.

    Transfer the symbolic data into Finale and print the converted music.

  4. Save the same page or entire work from the previous exercise into the MIDI format from SharpEye. Import the MIDI file into Finale and print the music without making any alterations.

  5. Make observations about the differences in the printouts made in the previous two exercises.
-- Craig Stuart Sapp