Automatic Organization of Digital Music Documents

Abstract

This thesis presents work towards automatic organization and synchronization of scanned sheet music and digitized audio recordings in the scenario of a digital music library. The organization targeted in the project of this thesis includes the segmentation of sheet music books and audio CD collections into individual songs or movements, mapping the resulting segments to corresponding records in a database of metadata, and temporally synchronizing the sheet music documents and audio recordings that belong to the same piece of music on a bar-wise level. Building up a digital music library with a large collection of digitized sheet music and audio recordings requires automated methods for organizing the data, because a manual organization is too expensive and time-consuming. <br /> In this thesis, a complete workflow addressing the practical issues that arise in building up and maintaining a digital music library for synchronized sheet music and audio recordings is presented. Algorithms and approaches for the automatic organization of music documents are proposed and evaluated. We introduce a software application to be used by library employees for the import of new data and editing of existing records that integrates the proposed automatic methods. This application, furthermore, allows semi-automatic or manual interaction where automatic approaches are not yet reliable enough to meet the high quality standards that are expected in a library environment. A prototypical user interface for users of the digital library is presented that allows for applications making explicit use of the synchronization between sheet music books and audio CD collections.