Musicians have been waiting impatiently for an application to read printed musical scores and convert them into MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface files for output on keyboards and synthesisers. At Comdex, a two year old Ojai, California-based company, Musitek Inc, was showing its first product, which it claims has cracked the problem on a personal computer. Midiscan takes its input in the form of any standard TIFF files and spits out its interpretation in an intermediate format which the company calls MNOD, Musical Notation Object Description. The MNOD interpretation is displayed as a standard musical score so that the user can correct any errors that may have crept into the interpretation before it is written as standard MIDI information. Christopher Newell, president and chief executive, says that the closely-held company has spent 10 PhD-years on perfecting the product, which he claims manages a 98% recognition rate. The software can automatically distinguish between various score types – everything from solo or piano music to conductors’ orchestral sheets with up to 16 staves per line – each part is assigned to a separate MIDI channel. A well-endowed 80386 machine will take between three and five minutes to interpret each sheet, depending on the density of the score. Newell admits that there are still a few things that the software cannot do – in particular it does not handle the dynamic marks that define volume, or tempo markings. However he says he hopes to establish MNOD as an industry standard for storing musical information, since it retains information that is lost in the MIDI format, and once he gets backing from the industry, work will begin on extending the format. Midiscan for Windows is due to ship in the first week of July, with Macintosh and Atari versions following next year.
