Making music notation searchable: Large-scale optical music recognition, search, and retrieval across institutions


If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

While music libraries around the world are digitizing millions of musical scores, there are currently very few efforts underway at extracting the musical content from these page images and making the music notation available for large-scale search and analysis.

This talk will introduce the work underway in the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project, a multi-year international research initiative that is developing tools and best-practices for large-scale music document recognition and search.

Andrew Hankinson is a digital humanist, librarian, academic, and coder. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, working on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music project, and is associated with the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project hosted at McGill University in Montréal, Québec.

Andrew recently completed his dissertation on large-scale optical music recognition. His research focuses primarily on large-scale music document digitization, recognition, search, and retrieval.