Musical scores are a central resource for music research. SIMSSA targets digitized (scanned) music scores as part of a larger program, the Networked Environment for Music Analysis, to design a 21st-century infrastructure for analyzing all types of music media.

There are two major obstacles to the use of online musical scores. An unprecedented number of musical scores are available on the Internet: all across the world libraries, archives, and museums are digitizing their print and manuscript books and scores. No standards exist currently, however, to unify these collections so that digital scores can be found in one place. It is also virtually impossible to perform content-based searches of online scores (in contrast with digitized text). There is simply no reliable optical music recognition (OMR) software comparable to the optical character recognition (OCR) software that institutions use to make text collections searchable.

In order to gather scores in one place we will develop ways to locate the music scores found inside digitized books (Google Books, Internet Archive, etc.). We will then index the information centrally at our website so that in the future, each digital object will be easily locatable. In other words, we will be creating a union catalogue of digitized scores.

In order to make the scores searchable, the images must be processed further using OMR. We will deploy two state-of-the-art OMR technologies currently under development. We are particularly committed to providing OMR solutions for older music notation systems. Searchable musical scores will enable us to ask new questions about music, and provide better answers to old ones. Now is the moment to create a new research environment and a new set of research tools.

For more information, please contact Ichiro Fujinaga.