AP 186 Activity 11: Playing notes by image processing

The first hindrance for me in this activity is that I can't read notes. I think we were taught how to read back in highschool but I don't quite remember. I'm not that much musically inclined, my relationship with music is basically me being able to hear and knowing the tunes that I like. I wish it were more, but oh well.

So here, we are to extract the notes in a simple score and play it using Scilab. Seems pretty easy, until I realized there is so much in a musical score. First, I binarized the image of the score through thresholding, and I inverted the values. Also took samples of the notes, a half note and a quarter note, from the score music and binarized and inverted it as well. My idea is to clean these images by morphological operations and then segment them and take out the notes as needed.

Fig 1. Line from Are You Sleeping musical score (top) then binarized and inverted (bottom).

Fig 2. Segmented musical score.

Fig 3. Quarter notes (above) and half notes (below)

I turned the image clockwise to get the index of the notes in order. I fished out the next quarter notes and the half notes to give them their respective durations. I also thought about using template matching for this but I think this is also a good alternative in determining notes using image analysis.

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Thanks to BA, I got ideas from discussions with him

AP 186 manual

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I give myself 9/10 for this because I think my method is too crude. There are more eloquent ways to solve this.