How current optical music recognition systems are becoming useful for digital libraries

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) promises to make large collections of sheet music searchable by their musical content. It would open up novel ways of accessing the vast amount of written music that has never been recorded before. For a long time, OMR was not living up to that promise, as its performance was simply not good enough, especially on handwritten music or under non-ideal image conditions. However, OMR has recently seen a number of improvements, mainly due to the advances in machine learning. In this work, we take an OMR system based on the traditional pipeline and an end-to-end system, which represent the current state of the art, and illustrate in proof-of-concept experiments their applicability in retrieval settings. We also provide an example of a musicological study that can be replicated with OMR outputs at much lower costs. Taken together, this indicates that in some settings, current OMR can be used as a general tool for enriching digital libraries.