Not sure if this will be of great interest for oudists but I have recently been playing around with music editing software, mostly relating to lute
playing - mainly to discover how far advanced the technology is today and for fun - transcribing keyboard pieces by early and modern composers into
lute tablature etc.
One software program that I have tried out with some success is a music Optical Character Recognition (O.C.R.) program that enables me to scan a piece
of printed sheet music and have the software translate this into a MIDI sound file that can then be played back or used as input to a musical editing
program.
PhotoScore MIDI Lite can be purchased - as an introductory offer - for only $24 US from http://www.neuratron.com and is a stripped down version of their more powerful PhotoScore Professional that costs $199 US.
The software reads the scanned image of a musical score and displays its interpretation for comparison against the original score so that any errors
or corrections can be made manually using a very easy to use editing feature. The corrected version can then be converted and saved as a MIDI file.
Apparently musical OCR is difficult to achieve but this software, to my mind, is surprisingly accurate if the scan is a clear printed score. Hand
written scores may work if very clear but the software is not designed to interpret manuscript music.
Both Photoscore Professional and PhotoScore Lite can be downloaded as free demo versions that are fully functional (except that files cannot be saved)
- so anyone interested can experiment without obligation.
I have no connection with Neuratron - except as a customer - just interested in the technology and thought that some oud players might be interested
in exploring the possibilities that this - or similar software might provide.
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