Bringing Sheet Music to Life: My Experiences with OMR

Abstract

This article describes the process of digitizing sheet music celebrating Pullman porters and rail travel from the 1870s-1920s. The process involves 1) digitizing sheet music, 2) running the digitized sheet music through an Optical Musical Recognition (OMR) software package, 3)cleaning up the resulting file, 4) converting it into an .mp3/MIDI file, and 5) tweaking it to use the voices/instruments of a music editing software program. The pros and cons of some popular OMR programs are discussed.