Fingering Watermarking in Symbolic Digital Scores

We propose a new watermarking method that hides the writer’s identity into symbolic musical scores featuring fingering annotations. These annotations constitute a valuable part of the symbolic representation, yet they can be slightly modified without altering the quality of the musical information. The method applies a controlled distortion of the existing fingerings so that unauthorized copies can be identified. The proposed watermarking method is robust against attacks like random fingering alterations and score cropping, and its detection does not require the original fingering, but only the suspect one. The method is general and applies to various fingering contexts and instruments.