SharpEye

SharpEye Music Scanning Program

SharpEye is an optical music recognition program which has an interactive graphical environment for editing the symbolic music notation extracted from scanned music.

Start SharpEye in the Lab by clicking on the taskbar icon which looks like a cyan/black wholenote with a sharp in front of it. Music can be scanned directly from SharpEye using the "Aquire" option in the File menu, or you can scan with a separate program and choose "Open Image" option in the File menu to load the graphic music. When processing several pages of music, it is more efficient to first scan with the Epson GT-15000 Scanner, and then process the scanned images in batch mode within SharpEye.

Exercises

1. Become familiar with the basic SharpEye scanning process by following these instructions:

• Download a TIFF image of an example page of music by clicking on the thumbnail image to the right, or print out the PDF version of the music and scan into SharpEye (or use a stand-alone scanning program to scan).
• Load the graphic image into SharpEye and convert to symbolic notation.
• Play the converted music inside of SharpEye.
• Save the music as MusicXML data.
• Import the Music into Finale using the Plugin menu for MusicXML Import.
• Print the converted music from Finale.

1. Compare the original PDF file and the version of the music printed by Finale. What aspects of the music were preserved? Which were lost?
2. Transfer the symbolic data into Finale and print the converted music.
3. Save the same page or entire work from the previous exercise into the MIDI format from SharpEye. Import the MIDI file into Finale and print the music without making any alterations.
4. Make observations about the differences in the printouts made in the previous two exercises.

Links

• http://www.visiv.co.uk Homepage for SharpEye.
• http://www.visiv.co.uk/about.htm A brief description of SharpEye.
• http://www.visiv.co.uk/manualv2.pdf SharpEye Manual (in PDF format).
• http://www.visiv.co.uk/L2SDKdoc.htm Documentation for the Liszt music-OCR engine which runs behind the scene in the SharpEye graphical user interface.
• http://www.visiv.co.uk/tech-mro.htm Internal data format used in SharpEye.
• http://www.recordare.com/xml.html Description of MusicXML.
• http://www.recordare.com/xml.html Description of MusicXML.
• http://gamera.sourceforge.net Gamera: A software framework for the creation of domain-specific recognition applications. Music OCR being one application.