Towards Bridging the Gap between Sheet Music and Audio

Abstract

Sheet music and audio recordings represent and describe music
on different semantic levels. Sheet music describes abstract high-level
parameters such as notes, keys, measures, or repeats in a visual form.
Because of its explicitness and compactness, most musicologists discuss
and analyze the meaning of music on the basis of sheet music. On the
contrary, most people enjoy music by listening to audio recordings, which
represent music in an acoustic form. In particular, the nuances and subtleties
of musical performances, which are generally not written down
in the score, make the music come alive. In this paper, we address the
problem of bridging the gap between the sheet music domain and the audio
domain. In particular, we discuss aspects on music representations,
music synchronization, and optical music recognition, while indicating
various strategies and open research problems.