Graphic to Symbolic Representations of Musical Notation

This paper discusses the SCORE data format, a graphically oriented music representation developed in the early 1970’s, and how such a representation can be converted into sequential descriptions of music notation. The graphical representation system for the SCORE editor is presented along with case studies for parsing and converting the data into other symbolic music formats such as Dox, Humdrum, MusicXML, MuseData, MEI, and MIDI using scorelib, an open-source code library for parsing SCORE data. Knowledge and understanding of the SCORE format is also useful for OMR (Optical Music Recognition) projects, as it can be used as an intermediate layer between raw image scans and higher-level digital music representation systems.