Abstract: Handwritten Music Recognition, especially in the historical domain, is an inherently challenging endeavour; paper degradation artefacts and the ambiguous nature of handwriting make recognising such scores an error-prone process, even for the current state-of-the-art Sequence to Sequence models. In this work we propose a way of reducing the production of statistically implausible output sequences by fusing a Language Model into a recognition Sequence to Sequence model. The idea is leveraging visually-conditioned and context-conditioned output distributions in order to automatically find and correct any mistakes that would otherwise break context significantly. We have found this approach to improve recognition results to 25.15 SER (%) from a previous best of 31.79 SER (%) in the literature.
Keywords: optical music recognition; historical sources; diversity; music theory; digital humanities