Meinard Müeller

Thitaree Tanprasert, Teerapat Jenrungrot, Meinard Mueller et al.

MIDI-sheet music alignment is the task of finding correspondences between a MIDI representation of a piece and its corresponding sheet music images. Rather than using optical music recognition to bridge the gap between sheet music and MIDI, we explore an alternative approach: projecting the MIDI data into pixel space and performing alignment in the image domain. Our method converts the MIDI data into a crude representation of the score that only contains rectangular floating notehead blobs, a process we call bootleg score synthesis. Furthermore, we project sheet music images into the same bootleg space by applying a deep watershed notehead detector and filling in the bounding boxes around each detected notehead. Finally, we align the bootleg representations using a simple variant of dynamic time warping. On a dataset of 68 real scanned piano scores from IMSLP and corresponding MIDI performances, our method achieves a 97.3% accuracy at an error tolerance of one second, outperforming several baseline systems that employ optical music recognition.

Meinard Müller, Andreas Arzt, Stefan Balke et al.

There has been a rapid growth of digitally available music data, including audio recordings, digitized images of sheet music, album covers and liner notes, and video clips. This huge amount of data calls for retrieval strategies that allow users to explore large music collections in a convenient way. More precisely, there is a need for cross-modal retrieval algorithms that, given a query in one modality (e.g., a short audio excerpt), find corresponding information and entities in other modalities (e.g., the name of the piece and the sheet music). This goes beyond exact audio identification and subsequent retrieval of metainformation as performed by commercial applications like Shazam [1].