New font for OMR and general music fonts
The Omr project is being used more and more, and I do think a handwritten-like soundfont would be useful for producing better training sets for the machine learning part of it. The current fonts are perfect for printing sheet music, but they look far from any handritten sheet music I've ever seen.
Actually, should a new repo be created exclusively with music fonts to be used in Musescore?
Counting the ones used in Finale, the ones used in Sibellius, the four in MuseScore, and the other few in other music editing software, there is maybe 15 music fonts. This number looks awfully small to me.
The question is, can something be done about it?
Comments
Having used OMR intensively since 2013, I have to say that there remains a lot to improve in the recognition of printed sheet music, and that's probably where the effort should stay in terms of machine learning. OMR will make the digitisation of the huge IMSLP public domain music library much easier - and speed up the OpenScore project.
Asking OMR to recognise the handwriting of random different composers is significantly more difficult. Two years ago I earnestly tried to use an expensive commercial OMR system which claimed to handle handwritten music. I was using scores by an early 20thC composer with an exceptionally neat hand. And the recognition rate by the OMR was... frankly awful.
Ever since that experience, I have transcribed by hand when the source score is a handwritten manuscript. But when using printed sheet music, OMR is highly productive and gives me recognition success rates of 70% up to 100%. Shouldn't our efforts be directed towards raising that lower figure of 70% nearer to 100%?
In reply to Having used OMR intensively… by DanielR
I must agree to your point on OMR, there is still a lot of work to do before using it for manuscripts. But what about the amazingly small number of music fonts?
In reply to I must agree to your point… by ecstrema
I don't wish to appear unenthusiastic, but I only ever use 2-3 fonts in a word processor (and there must be 100+ fonts available there). And I would feel just the same about having a wide choice of different music fonts, because my interest is in classical music - and the music fonts I need are already available in MuseScore. Other users (e.g. jazz players) will feel quite differently on this topic, and jazz is one area where a few new music fonts have been appearing. They do give a handwritten feel to the sheet music.