Detecting Notational Errors in Digital Music Scores

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Léo, Géré, Audebert, Nicolas, Jacquemard, Florent
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Léo, Géré
Audebert, Nicolas
Jacquemard, Florent
author_facet Léo, Géré
Audebert, Nicolas
Jacquemard, Florent
contents Music scores are used to precisely store music pieces for transmission and preservation. To represent and manipulate these complex objects, various formats have been tailored for different use cases. While music notation follows specific rules, digital formats usually enforce them leniently. Hence, digital music scores widely vary in quality, due to software and format specificity, conversion issues, and dubious user inputs. Problems range from minor engraving discrepancies to major notation mistakes. Yet, data quality is a major issue when dealing with musical information extraction and retrieval. We present an automated approach to detect notational errors, aiming at precisely localizing defects in scores. We identify two types of errors: i) rhythm/time inconsistencies in the encoding of individual musical elements, and ii) contextual errors, i.e. notation mistakes that break commonly accepted musical rules. We implement the latter using a modular state machine that can be easily extended to include rules representing the usual conventions from the common Western music notation. Finally, we apply this error-detection method to the piano score dataset ASAP. We highlight that around 40% of the scores contain at least one notational error, and manually fix multiple of them to enhance the dataset's quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02746
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detecting Notational Errors in Digital Music Scores
Léo, Géré
Audebert, Nicolas
Jacquemard, Florent
Multimedia
Music scores are used to precisely store music pieces for transmission and preservation. To represent and manipulate these complex objects, various formats have been tailored for different use cases. While music notation follows specific rules, digital formats usually enforce them leniently. Hence, digital music scores widely vary in quality, due to software and format specificity, conversion issues, and dubious user inputs. Problems range from minor engraving discrepancies to major notation mistakes. Yet, data quality is a major issue when dealing with musical information extraction and retrieval. We present an automated approach to detect notational errors, aiming at precisely localizing defects in scores. We identify two types of errors: i) rhythm/time inconsistencies in the encoding of individual musical elements, and ii) contextual errors, i.e. notation mistakes that break commonly accepted musical rules. We implement the latter using a modular state machine that can be easily extended to include rules representing the usual conventions from the common Western music notation. Finally, we apply this error-detection method to the piano score dataset ASAP. We highlight that around 40% of the scores contain at least one notational error, and manually fix multiple of them to enhance the dataset's quality.
title Detecting Notational Errors in Digital Music Scores
topic Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02746