PhotoScore
. . . scans
and reads printed music. PhotoScore is a music scanning program - the
musical equivalent of a text OCR program. Scanning text is difficult for
computers to do, and has only achieved reasonable accuracy in the last
few years. Music scanning is much harder because of the more complicated
range of symbols involved, because of the complex two-dimensional ‘grammar’
of music, and because some markings such as hairpins and phrase-marks
are of a variable shape and size.
The difficulty
with scanning music or text is that by scanning a page, a computer does
not ‘understand’ it. As far as the computer is concerned, scanning a page
merely presents it with a grid of millions of black and white dots, which
could be music, text, a photograph or anything else. The process of actually
reading or interpreting music, text or pictures from this grid of dots
is extremely complex and poorly understood. A large part of the human
brain, containing many millions of connections, is devoted solely to solving
this ‘pattern recognition’ problem. For this reason, only a handful of
music scanning programs have ever been developed, and past attempts have
generally been very slow, very inaccurate, or unable to recognize many
standard musical markings. PhotoScore represents a significant advance,
being able to read a wide variety of music with high speed, accuracy and
a good range of music symbols.
There
are two versions of PhotoScore: PhotoScore
Professional and PhotoScore MIDI.
- PhotoScore
Professional works only with the Sibelius music notation software.*
- PhotoScore MIDI works with any music notation software.
*All versions of PhotoScore can save MIDI files which can be used by virtually all music editing packages. Please note that because MIDI files are primarily designed for playback and not notation, there are certain types of musical features that cannot be stored as distinguishable objects in PhotoScore MIDI. Instead these are intelligently simulated by PhotoScore MIDI and include articulation marks, accidentals, clefs, time signatures, key signatures, ties and dynamics.