Abstract
Computers are used to manipulate music in various forms, for example digital sound recordings, digitized images of printed scores and music representational language (M.R.L.) encodings. This work is concerned with producing M.R.L. data automatically from existing printed music scores. A review of work undertaken in the field of manipulating printed music by computer is provided. This shows that software which permits production of high-quality scores is commercially available, but the necessary data has to be entered using some form of keyboard, possibly in conjunction with a pointing device. It is desirable, for reasons detailed in this work, to be able to convert the musical information contained in the enormous quantity of existing music into computer-readable form. The only practical method for achieving this is via an automatic system. Such an automatic system must cope with the variations in format, content and print-quality of existing scores. Background material relating to previous work on pattern recognition of various types of binary image is included, with a section covering the subject of automatic recognition of printed music. An original system for automatic recognition of printed music developed by the author is described. This is designed to be widely applicable and hence is, in effect, omnifont and size-independent, with significant tolerance of noise, limited rotation, broken print and distortion. Numerous illustrations showing the application of the system are included, together with proposals for future areas of development.