2018 9th International Conference on Information Technology in Medicine and Education
Barcode Music score
LI Zhigang
Command & Control Engineering College, Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing, China, 210007
Email: lzgnudt@qq.com
Abstract—Numbered music notation and staff music notation
are two common music score for recording music, which
existed for many decades. These two types of music notation
are convenient for music learners and musicians, but not
for the automatic recognition devices, such as the intelligent
mobile phones with cameras. The existing OMR researches on
sheet music score recognition mainly focus on the recognition
accuracy of the original sheet music score. In this paper, a new
solution is proposed for the automatic music score recognition
based on inventing a new type of music score using two
dimensional barcode technology, named barcode music score.
First, the music score is transformed and encoded into a two
dimensional barcode. Then this barcode can be decoded to
music melody by scanning it using an intelligent mobile device
with a built-in camera and an accustomed playing APP. As
the barcode music score can be decoded by a mobile device,
then it provides a new convenient way for music self-learning
except reading the original sheet music score, especially for the
children in the less developed areas, with less music teachers.
Keywords-barcode; music education; music score; OMR;
I. I NTRODUCTION
The music score is the primary artifact for recording and
learning music. Numbered music score and staff music score
are two common music score types, which existed for many
decades. These two types of music score are convenient for
composers and musicians, which are often printed or written
on papers. But they are not convenient for the primary music
learners and machine recognition.
Optical music recognition (OMR) is one kind of music
digitization to convert sheet music scores into the digital
formats that could be stored in intelligent devices. The
research on OMR has undergone much important achieve-
ments since it’s first proposed by Pruslin [1] and Prerau
[2]. Almost all the OMR researches are based on the text or
image recognition algorithms, by scanning the original sheet
music scores. There’s a tradeoff between the recognition
accuracy and resources usage. It means if you want to get
more accurate result, you need better computer and camera
devices. Almost all the commercial OMR softwares need
be installed in good performance PCs with high definition
cameras, which are not always convenient to carry and
deploy. So the OMR system is suitable for converting the
original sheet music score into digital ones only one time.
After that we get the digital music file, which could be used
in the future to avoid using the OMR system again. The
2474-3828/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ITME.2018.00095
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digital music files are often stored in computers or web sites
by some professional institutions or experts, etc, which is
not always convenient to retrieve, especially for the users in
some less developed areas.
As the development and popular of the mobile devices,
they give us more convenience in our lives including lis-
tening and learning music. We can assume the following
scenario that can help the music learners. The primary music
learners only have music textbooks and a mobile phone.
They want to know how to sing a certain music score, but
they have no teachers besides them. They take out their own
mobile phone and scan the sheet music score. Then they can
get the melody of the music score. But until now, we didn’t
find an effective OMR system for mobile phones, because
the current mobile phones do not have so many resources to
support complicated OMR algorithms. For example, in the
literature [3], the authors built an Android platform for sheet
music score recognition, however, it claimed “a 76.03%
accuracy rate for the scanned sheet music and 71.43% for
the sheet music captured by a mobile phone’s camera”.
Inspired by the above scenario and in order to solve the
OMR problems in mobile phones, we propose a bypass
method and a new presentation of music score. The essential
idea of our method is to convert and store the traditional
musical score into a two dimensional barcode. This barcode
can be printed beside the original sheet music score. A
mobile APP can scan this barcode and then play the melody
of this music score. Such mobile APP does not need much
computing resources or high performance cameras. Our
method, however, is not a substitute of the OMR. Actually,
our method is a complement of the current OMR systems.
The barcode music score is a kind of middle-level music
score, which is suitable for printing on papers and for
machine reading. It is a better and simple music interface
bridging the gap between the sheet music score and the
audio.
II. M OTIVATION
A. Reading music score
In the process of music learning, reading music score is
a fundamental training for the primary music learners. For
a music learner, it is necessary to know the meaning and
tune of each notation. In the music score, each notation
represents one or more attributes of a sound. Because of
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the characteristic of the sound, the primary learners need
a long training time to imitate and identify the correct
voice (or the pronunciation) of the teacher, the tune of the
music instruments, or the tune of the music playing devices.
A lot of students, especially in the less developed areas,
cannot obtain effective instruction and training because of
less music teachers and resources. Therefore, in these cases,
self-learning is one important music educational style. In
some less developed areas, the printed music textbooks
are the only teaching materials for these students, except
the teachers’ instruction. The printed music textbooks can
only record the music, however, it cannot “sing” or play
the melody of the music. Because of the gap between the
sheet music score and the audio, most of the students of
high schools or college schools cannot read the music score
correctly even they have many music textbooks. As the
sheet music score will exist for a long time due to the
habits of music composition and learning, to make the music
textbooks “sing” is a solution for this problem.
B. Music digitization
In the information times, the music digitization provides
many effective ways for self-music-learning. Broadly speak-
ing, the music digitization includes many music media re-
sources, such as videos, mp3, TV programs, etc. The learners
can teach themselves by watching TV programs, listening
radios and CDs, or visiting Internet music resources, etc, in
addition to reading music text books. In the narrow sense,
the music digitization only means the conversion of analog
music source, such as the voice of the music instruments,
the songs or the sheet music scores.
MIDI(Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a famous
music digitization technical standard, which describes a pro-
tocol, digital interface and connectors, mainly for allowing a
wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers or
other related devices to connect and communicate with one
another. The MIDI cannot process the sheet music score
directly. The OMR is another famous music digitization
technology which aims to enable the machine to “read” the
sheet music score.
III. OMR AND ITS ARCHITECTURE
The OMR uses the image recognition technology to
recognize and encode music score into a machine readable
format. The main tasks of the OMR include recognition,
conversation, representation and storage of musical scores
by an intelligent machine. The recognition process is the
core and the most complicated task of the OMR. Generally,
the OMR can be divided into four stages as the Figure 1. In
the first stage, the camera devices are used to scan the sheet
musical score and generate a digital music score image as
an input to the computer. Some preprocessing techniques,
such as enhancement, binarization, noiseremoval, blurring,
deskewing, etc, can be applied on this image in order to
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make the recognition more robust and efficient [4]. Then the
preprocessed image is taken as the input for the recognition
of music score symbols. The machine learning, pattern
recognition techniques are often used in this stage in order
to identify each different symbol in the music score image.
In the third and fourth stages, the recognized symbols are
encoded into machine-readable format, such as MusicXML
and MIDI. The new music score format can be stored in the
computers.
The recognition accuracy is a challenging area in the
OMR research. Some recent researches and OMR systems
(such as SmartScore) claim they can reach ideal results.
But we argue that the accuracy of the OMR does not only
depend on the OMR system itself, it is also affected by
the definition of the original sheet music score, especially
for the complex printed music notation with many similar
symbols, for example “1”(Do) and “i” in a numbered music
score. If the little dot at the top of “i” is not clear, the image
recognition application may take it as “1” ,which will cause
recognition errors.
In our work, we do not try to design another recognition
algorithm or system. We propose a bypass method for the
music score scanning and transforming. We argue that we
can reconstruct the digital music score into a two dimen-
sional barcode format except the traditional numbered and
staff musical score.
IV. BARCODE MUSIC SCORE
The barcode technology has been used in many areas
of our lives [5]. The most common barcodes include one
dimensional barcodes and two dimensional barcodes. Gener-
ally, a barcode is composed by combination and arrangement
of white parts and black parts in patterns of square, dots, bars
and other geometric patterns within the image. A barcode
contains a certain amount of information. The users can read
the information by scanning the barcode. The current two
dimensional barcode can store more than 1850 alphabets or
2710 numbers. A common numbered music score may need
three or four hundred symbols. It means a two dimensional
barcode has enough capacity to store a numbered music
score. More important, the two dimensional barcode has
error correction function [6]. Actually speaking, the barcode
technology has already been used in the music field. For
example, you can write an Internet URL in the barcode.
This URL points to a music file, which is actually stored in a
remote Internet server. If you want to retrieve this music file,
you must scan this barcode to get the URL. Next you must
have the Internet connection such as WIFI and 4G, otherwise
you cannot get it. Our idea is writing the original music score
information into the barcode directly, which does not need
the Internet or background database to store any data.
 Figure 1. The general architecture of the OMR system.
A. Overview of barcode music score architecture
The idea of barcode music score is digitalizing the music
score into a numbered sequence first, then storing and
writing them into a two dimensional barcode, which we
call barcode music score. In order to play the melody of
the music score, we developed an intelligent mobile phone
application (APP), which can scan this barcode and decode
the music information and play it. The Figure 2 shows the
overview architecture of the generalization and utilization of
the barcode music score.
As Figure 2 shows, the transformation module is the core
of the barcode music score architecture. It is responsible for
the music score digitalizing. The transformation system can
be the existing OMR systems or an input system by hand.
A musical note coding table is need for the transformation
system. The barcode music score can be printed on papers
or stored in computers.
B. The design of musical note coding table
The musical note coding table (MNCT) is the core of the
transformation modular. Actually speaking, the MNCT is a
function that map each symbol of the original music note to
a corresponding code. An OMR system also needs similar
coding table engine. This paper just presents some methods
and examples to design MNCT. But we argue that a standard
and general MNCT table is needed. For simplicity, in this
paper, we only focus on the pitch note and its duration.
For example, we can use three single digit numbers such
as “abc” to denote a pitch note and its duration, where “c”
stands the name of the note, “b” stands its mode and “a”
stands its duration. Such coding method is readable and easy
for transformation by hand, but it needs more storage space
as it needs three single digit numbers to denote one pitch.
It needs 8 bits to denote a number in computer, so it needs
24 bits to denote one pitch. The Table I gives an example
of such coding method.
In order to use less bits to denote one pitch, we can encode
the music pitch into binary sequence. It only need 8 bits
to denote one pitch. We can also use some compression
algorithms, such as Haffman-Tree, to make the encoding
more efficient.
V. T HE IMPLEMENTATION OF BARCODE MUSIC SCORE
The implementation of barcode music score includes two
parts, generation program on the PC and scanning & playing
application on the mobile device.
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Pitch Mode Duration Coding
half 211
low pitch quarter 411
eighth 811
half 221
1 (Do) middle pitch quarter 421
eighth 821
half 231
high pitch quarter 431
eighth 831
Table I
E XAMPLE CODING OF DIFFERENT MODE AND DURATION OF P ITCH
1(D O )
A. Generation of the barcode music score
The generation program on the PC mainly transforms the
traditional music score into a number sequence according
to the MNCT. In our demo program, we carry out the
transformation work by hand according to the MNCT. In
the future, the existing OMR systems can be used in this
stage. Then the generated sequence is written into a two
dimensional barcode. We develop our program in JAVA
and use the following jar tool package and the following
main code (Figure 3) to generate the barcode music score.
The byte sequence variable “barcodeMusicscoreSequence”
keeps the generated number sequence and the image file
“exampleBarcodemusicscore.png” is responsible for storing
the final barcode image.
B. Scanning and playing of the barcode
In order to play the barcode music score, we develop
an APP for Android mobile phone. This APP is composed
of three main modules including barcode scanning module,
music score showing module and playing module.
The scanning module responses to open the camera and
to scan the barcode, which just likes to scan the barcode in
other applications. Through the scanning module, the coding
of the music score will be decoded to a number sequence.
We also use the open-source code to develop our scanning
module. The showing module responses to show the result.
In our demo, we just show this number sequence. In our
future work, we will transform this number sequence to
the traditional music score. Theplaying module responses to
resolve the number sequence and to search the corresponding
music note and the corresponding tune one by one. All the
tunes are stored in the application previously. In our demo,
 Figure 2. The overview of the barcode music score architecture.

Figure 3. The code for generating the barcode music score.

Figure 4. An example of the barcode music score.

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 understand and realize. This is just our original intention
– “make it simple”. But as we argued above, the standard
of the barcode music score is needed in order to spread
it. As the current barcode music score is an assistant tool
to help the students to learn music, it is not a strict format
just like the MusicXML and MIDI. Because the MusicXML
needs too much tags and the coding of the MIDI is too
complicated, we do not adopt their standards. In our future
work, we try to propose an appropriate standard of the
barcode music score.
R EFERENCES
[1] D. Pruslin, Automatic recognition of sheet music, 1966. Hei-
delberg: Springer, 1992.

[2] D. Prerau, Computer pattern recognition of standard engraved

music notation,1970. Heidelberg: Springer, 1992.

[3] N. Luangnapa, T. Silpavarangkuraet, C. Nukoolkit, and P.

(a) Scanning interface (b) Showing and playing interface Mongkolnam, Optical music recognition on android platform,
in Advances in Information Technology, 2012.
Figure 5. The interfaces of the APP.
[4] A. Rebelo, I. Fujinaga, F. Filipe Paszkiewicz, A. Marcal, C.
Guedes, and J. Cardoso, Optical music recognition: state-of-
we use the standard piano tune media sources. Because a the-art and open issues, Int J Multimed Info Retr, vol. 1, pp.
standard piano has 88 keys, we only store 88 tunes. They 173C190, 2012.
do not need too much storage space.
[5] P. Zhou and X. Rong, Applications of 2d barcode for mobile
VI. E XAMPLES OF BARCODE MUSIC SCORE tagging, Advanced Materials Research, vol. 174, pp. 171C174,
2010.
A famous nursery rhymes “Frère Jacques” (In Chinese, its
name is “Two tigers” ) is taken as an example. For simplicity, [6] H. Kato and K. Tan, Pervasive 2d barcodes for camera phone
we can transform the numbered music score into a number applications, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 6, no. 4, pp.
sequence according to the MNCT. As a demo,we use the 76C85, 2007.
simplest method “abc” style to denote a music note and
transform it by hand. At last we get the following number
sequence: 421 422 423 421 421 422 423 421 423 424 225
423 424 225 825 826 825 824 423 421 825 826 825 824
423 421 422 415 221 422 415 221.
In this number sequence, each three single digit numbers
denote a music note. Then this sequence is written to a
barcode and can be printed on a paper beside the original
music score. Then we can use the mobile phone with the
APP to scan it and play its melody. Figure 5(a) shows the
scanning interface, which is scanning a barcode music score.
Figure 5(b) shows the showing and playing interface, in
which the number sequence is displayed on the screen. When
the “play” button is touched, the melody will be played.
VII. D ISCUSSION AND C ONCLUSION
In this work, we propose the thought of the barcode music
score. The information of the original music score can be
written into a barcode, which is easy to implement and
convenient for music teaching and learning. We also design
an simple coding method and develop a demo application
to realize the music barcode music. Frankly speaking, the
transformation, generalization and utilization of the barcode
music score is not a very hard work, instead, it is easy to

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