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Professor Ichiro Fujinaga and his team of researchers awarded 2.5 million dollar grant from SSHRC to build digital musical recognition tools.

Published: 29 August 2014
(From McGill Newsroom Feed) 
For Ichiro Fujinaga, the thought of a thousand years of print and manuscript music collecting dust on the shelves of libraries and museums around the globe motivates him to think beyond the limitations of technology. What if digitized musical scores could be searched for a sequence of pitches, rhythms, and text? Music scholarship would be forever transformed. The goal of the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project (SIMSSA) is to build the tools to teach computers to recognize the musical symbols in images, and assemble the data on a single website, making it possible to search and analyze online musical scores for the first time. “Every step of this will be about learning and every correction to the optical recognition program will be about teaching the computer to do it better the next time” said Julie Cumming, Associate Dean, Research and Administration, at McGill’s Schulich School of Music and co-investigator on the project. Partner institutions including museums, great research libraries, and universities will provide both digital images and expertise, making it possible to search and analyze their collections in new ways. “Very few people have access to a music library” says Cumming. “This is going to give everyone access to scores, plus the tools to search them.”    Read more here
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