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.