Newbie question on music notation software
Hi! I'm a newbie, and a "Sunday musician". I play organ at a very small Episcopal Church. My problem is that I am new at the organ and struggling to learn the technology. Compounded with the problem that I have an almost perfect music memory and once I hear a piece of music I can play it by ear! My music reading skills, however, are very poor. I'm 62, and remember my Russian piano teacher trying to teach me to read, but it was a losing battle, as once she played the piece of music for me I could play it back from memory, thus I never really developed the skill to read music proper. To that end, I can play any hymn at church, usually in the key of C, G, F or D with no problem. My organ has the ability to tune up or down by turning a dial, so I can effectively play anything in the key I'm comfortable in, but have the organ electronically transpose it so it comes out in the proper key that it was written in. So, what I'm looking for is software that would allow me to scan in sheet music, then do OCR on it so that I could have it transpose up/down into a key I can read easily enough, then print to out in the desired key! Is this even possible? I am fairly computer litterate, and own both a Mac and PC and have a decent quality scanner.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Mark Cooperstein
Big Stone Gap, VA
Comments
This may get you started: http://musescore.org/en/search/apachesolr_search/audiveris
Audiveris is an open source music scanner, but what you are asking for is a very difficult challenge, at least it was when I last checked.
Welcome and good luck.
MuseScore, primarily a notation sotware, has the capability of transposing a score, once entered manually, or imported (for example, via MusicXML).
Check out:
http://musescore.org/en/handbook/file-format
(read the part 'Share with other music software')
Regarding scanning and interpretion of sheet music see:
http://musescore.org/en/node/10538
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_OCR
which deals with OMR, or Optical Music Recognition
Welcome aboard...