Digital sheet music

Digital sheet music is technology for representing and displaying sheet music in a computer-readable format. With the emergence of several technological innovations, sheet music evolved in several stages into what was to be termed digital sheet music.

With the increased use of professional and personal computers during the 1980s, different programmers started working on desktop publishing music notation software. Various boxed music notation software applications appeared on the market, allowing users to input and edit sheet music digitally. In the beginning, the software only permitted printing on paper. It took some time before other virtual formats became possible (e.g. standard MIDI file, audio (wav, mp3) and MusicXML export). These files allowed manipulation such as instrument changes, transposition and even MIDI playback. In particular, software projects Finale and Sibelius grew to become successful commercial products and to define certain standards in digital music notation. Many free software projects also appeared (see list of scorewriters). Consequently, computer keyboard entry in combination with synthesizer keyboard entry became the most common method for music data entry in current digital use.

Optical music recognition (OMR) is software to “read” scanned sheet music. Although OMR contributed to the evolution of digital sheet music, it is currently still a complex problem. While the earliest attempts of OMR were made in the early 1970s, the first commercial products appeared in the early 90s. Currently, many commercial OMR tools are available: SharpEye2, SmartScore, Photoscore, CapellaScan. OMR can be simplified into four smaller tasks: staff line identification, musical object location, musical feature classification and musical semantics (Bainbridge & Bell, 2001). However, in most cases,s these systems operate only properly with well-scanned documents of high quality. When it comes to precision and reliability, none of the commercial OMR systems solve the problem in a satisfactory way. Especially since the tradition of notating music is quite diffuse and varied, it remains difficult to reduce its aesthetics to a few principles for a machine to follow.

With the emergence of electronic commerce in the 2000s, some traditional sheet publishers, as well as new entrants, developed online retailer websites to offer sheet music in an electronic manner. The first to offer the service online was Sheet Music Direct (1997) but quickly followed by MusicNotes and Sheet Music Score who were able to offer interactive features like transposition and change of instrument using scorch (Avid) technology. New comer Sheet Music Plus only recently (2011) entered the market, offering PDF files only. Those commercial services started as worldwide retailers with a large base of licensed sheet music and fast delivery, but progressively offered digital print, ranging from PDF-files to more dynamic offerings such as Scorch technology (Avid) which allowed for midi accompaniment, and on-the-fly change of keys and instruments. In addition, the popular use of digital sheet music required interchangeable digital formats. As such, MusicXML became a common format to share sheet music files between applications and to archive sheet music files for future use.

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