Introduction

Introduction

Optical character recognition, the ability to recognize an image of text and convert it to digital format, is a widely studied and well understood. By applying similar principles, symbols on a sheet of music, can be processed and easily converted to digital form.

As motivation for our research, we imagine our algorithm as a framework for a smartphone application, which complements a musician who needs a rendition of a song as a paradigm to emulate. An image taken by the musician is processed and subsequently synthesized into an instrumental piece.

With no similar application for music notation recognition available in the smartphone market, the creation of such a framework could have a potentially revolutionary impact. We will demonstrate, as a proof a concept, signal processing techniques, such a matched filters, and software strategies, of an object-oriented implementation, for designing such a framework in Matlab.