Interpreting Music Manuscripts: A Logic-Based, Object-Oriented Approach

This paper presents a complete framework for recognizing classes of machine-printed musical manuscripts. Our framework is designed around the decomposition of a manuscript into objects such as staves and bars which are processed with a knowledge base module that encodes rules in Prolog. Object decomposition focuses the recognition problem, and the rule base provides a powerful and exible way to encode the rules of a particular manuscript class. Our rule-base registers notes and stems, eliminates false-positives and correctly labels notes according to their position on the staa. We present results that show 99% accuracy at detecting note-heads and 95% accuracy in nding stems. 1 Figure 1: (top) This is a single staa from a manuscript to be interpreted. (bottom) The result of our tool nding notes, beams and stems.