Score following is the process of automatically listening to a live music performance and tracking the position in the score. It is an active area of research and stands at the intersection of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphi ...

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniq ...

, and

musicology Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some mu ...

. Score following was first introduced in 1984 independently by

Barry Vercoe Barry Lloyd Vercoe (born 1937) is a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer. He is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAOL, the underlying language for th ...

and Roger Dannenberg. Artistically, it is one of the main components for live electronic music of many composers such as

Pierre Boulez Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music. Born in Mont ...

and

Philippe Manoury Philippe Manoury (born 19 June 1952) is a French composer. Biography Manoury was born in Tulle and began composition studies at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris with Gérard Condé and Max Deutsch. He continued his studies from 1974 to ...

among others and is currently an active line of research in different communities such as

IRCAM IRCAM (French: ''Ircam, '', English: Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is ...

in Paris. The latest version of IRCAM's score following, developed by th
Musical Representations Team
is capable of following complex audio signals (monophonic and polyphonic) and synchronize events via the detected tempo of the performance in realtime. It's distributed publicly since 2009 under the name

Antescofo Antescofo is a program developed by Arshia Cont in 2007 at ''IRCAM'' in collaboration with composer Marco Stroppa to aid with the synchronization of electronics in live performances. It is a modular polyphonic Score following, Score Following syst ...

and has been successfully performed throughout the world for a wide number of contemporary music productions including realtime electronics. Other score following authors include Chris Raphael, Roger Dannenberg,

Miller Puckette Miller Smith Puckette (born 1959) is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for auth ...

, Nicola Orio, Arshia Cont, and Frank Weinstock (; ; ). For the first time, in October 2006, there is going to be a Score Following evaluation during the second Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchang
(MIREX)
It is expected that most systems participate and compete in live musical situations and the results be announced in public domain.

External links

Tonara Ltd, Polyphonic Score Following App and Technology

Vercoe demonstrating the Synthetic Performer at IRCAM in 1984

Antescofo (Ircam)
*
Automatic Accompaniment demo with Antescofo

SampleSumo, Score Following Technology
{{tech-stub Music software Musical training software

See also

External links