Firstly, the need to convert music notation into electronic formats is not going to go away. We have also licensed the SDK for use in more than one automated page turning application, and even a publishing company in China that use our system so that people can order music using a photo.įrom a commercial point of view there are several reasons I felt an OMR start-up would be viable in principal. We were involved in one project to control operatic lighting and potentially stage automation by synchronising with the orchestra through automatic score following. Some of the applications are a long way from what we mostly think of as music scanning, and might surprise you.
#SCAN TO MUSICXML LICENSE#
That project was realised around 2015 and we now license an add-in called ReadScoreLib to other developers around the world. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) comes into many applications, beyond the obvious music scanning uses, and we wanted to build a fast accurate plug-in for general use in the music application industry.
#SCAN TO MUSICXML SOFTWARE#
I sat down with the developer of PlayScore, Anthony Wilkes, to talk about how the app came to be, and how it will evolve in the future.ĭS: What was the original impetus for working on PlayScore?ĪW: The original project was to develop an Software Development Kit (SDK) so that developers could build a music reading capability in their software.
Just like having a fully-featured music notation app like Dorico available on your iPad allows new kinds of creativity in new settings, being able to simply take a photo of a page of music and then be able to sing or play along with it just a few seconds later is something that musicians could only have dreamed of even a few short years ago. You can go from a printed page of music to that same music being edited in Dorico in a matter of a minute or so, which is hugely useful and can save a lot of time typing or playing music into Dorico.Īs an example of the kind of novel workflow that a tool like PlayScore makes possible, here’s a video of tenor Charles Kim singing Wagner along to PlayScore’s playback of the aria he has loaded into the app: You can also send MIDI and, perhaps most usefully, MusicXML to other apps on your device, including Dorico. One of my own favourites is PlayScore, which is a sheet music scanning app that practically works like magic: simply point your smartphone or tablet camera at a page of music, take a photo, and just a couple of seconds later you can hear it played back. With the arrival of Dorico for iPad this past summer, it’s been exciting to dive in to the wider ecosystem of innovative apps for musicians available on the App Store.