Automatic Ornament Localisation, Recognition and Expression from Music Sheets

Musical notation is a means of passing on performance instructions with fidelity to others. Composers, however, often introduced embellishments to the music they performed notating these embellishments with symbols next to the relevant notes. In time, these symbols, known as ornaments, and their interpretation became standardized such that there are acceptable ways of interpreting an ornament. Although music books may contain footnotes which express the ornament in full notation, these remain cumbersome to read. Ideally, a music student will have the possibility of selecting ornamented notes and express them as full notation. The student should also have the possibility to collapse the expressed ornament back to its symbolic representation, giving the student the possibility of also becoming familiar with playing from the ornamented score. In this paper, we propose a complete pipeline that achieves this goal. We compare the use of COSFIRE and template matching for optical music recognition to identify and extract musical content from the score. We then express the score using MusicXML and design a simple user interface which allows the user to select ornamented notes, view their expressed notation and decide whether they want to retain the expressed notation, modify it, or revert to the symbolic representation of the ornament. The performance results that we achieve indicate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.