OpenScore - Tips for Transcribers

"How much interest still for OpenScore?"
Well, over the past 4-5 months the team of MuseScore transcribers on the OpenScore Lieder Corpus project has transcribed over 275 songs by German and French composers. Here's the link: https://musescore.com/openscore-lieder-corpus
That's quite a resource for academic research - and gives a lot of pleasure in listening to the works, some well-known but others a new discovery for many people.

So anything which gets more transcribers involved would be great!

There is plenty of interest from transcribers, but turning this interest into progress is more difficult. There is still a significant amount of manual work that goes into setting up templates for transcriptions, checking that transcriptions are accurate and meet the guidelines, ensuring consistency with other editions, and calculating the reward. I am working to address these issues, but I am reluctant to push for more transcribers until they have been resolved.

The Lieder Corpus project was able to avoid these issues because pretty much all of the pieces consisted of just a voice and a piano, so I was able to provide them with a single template score that met the guidelines and covered all of the pieces. Many of the OpenScore pieces have more than 10 instruments (some have over 100 instruments), and they often contain specialist instruments that transcribers are not familiar with. The Lieder Corpus pieces were all roughly 1 - 3 pages of music, whereas many of the OpenScore pieces are over 100 pages in length, with a varying density of music on each page.

I have written some small Python programs to help me create templates and check scores against the guidelines. I am going to make these tools available via a web interface, so that transcribers can upload scores and get feedback without waiting for a manual review. We can think about inviting more transcribers once these tools are in place, which should happen in the next week or two.