On the playground with PlayScore 2

For all the time we as composers, orchestrators, and copyists spend learning the notation software of choice, there are other tools that come alongside those that help with certain tasks either before or after the actual notation is set.  Programs like Acrobat, PDF Expert, the various PDF utilities from Notation Central/NYC Music Services, and file management programs like Renamer all help with various tasks that are technically outside the realm of actual music notation.  Another group of programs are music scanners, which started out as tools for archivists to scan old manuscripts for digital preservation and over the years evolved into larger software suites that offer various digital tools once you’ve scanned the music.

One of the latest entrants into this field is PlayScore 2, which uses “Optical Music Recognition” (or OMR) to scan the music, whether by taking an actual picture of the printed sheet music or loading a PDF into the app.  Once the music is scanned, the OMR system will read the music and play it back for you.  This is an amazing practice tool for students, teachers, choir directors, etc., where someone can upload the music, isolate their part to practice or mute their instrument and practice along with the accompaniment as the app plays the other instruments. 

All these features are powerful, but seemingly not very useful for us in the music notation engraving side of things.  Au contraire, my friends.  The OMR system, as part of its core function, reads and digitizes the music for playback and that data can then be exported as a MIDI or a MusicXML file.  Pure gold, right!  Now, if you have an old piece of sheet music that you were going to have to reengrave by hand or a piece that you need to transpose but only have a PDF, PlayScore 2 can now do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the music digitized.  How well this works is another question.

Recently, I started working as part of a team of engravers for a publisher and one of the main tasks is taking older titles in their collection and reengraving them in the newest template so the titles can be released again.  As these pieces are out of print, often I only have scans of old printed copies or PDFs of the original material, no source notation files to start with and then, there are often multiple files, done by different engravers originally and all of them need to be digitized to create the new version.  I decided to use PlayScore 2 as my first step in recreating the new versions and was pleasantly surprised at how accurate the scans were and how the musicxml conversion worked.  PlayScore 2 could scan an entire score, admittedly, not a very complex one, and export the entire document in minutes and then I’d load it directly into my template and get to work.  Brilliant!

However, as you will know if you’ve ever used a MusicXML file to go between different music notation software, the conversion is rarely perfect, and it can often be easier and faster to just reinput the music yourself as the XML conversion can often have unexpected errors and elements misplaced all over the score.  In this case, given the scores were not complex, I wanted to see if PlayScore 2 would save me time editing its work or if reinputting entirely myself would be faster.  After trying three titles with PlayScore 2, I can honestly say it cut down my time by about a third.  Yes, there were lots of edits I still had to make, i.e., it rarely got any kind of duplet, beyond a triplet, notated correctly so I learned that I would have to do those measures by hand, but largely, PlayScore 2 recognized the notes, rhythms, slurs, ties, articulations, and even lyrics (again, with some editing for sure) and translated them accurately.
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Emboldened by this, I then tried to use PlayScore 2 on a different, much more complex project of reengraving some art song pieces for vocal and piano to eventually be transposed.  This project was definitely beyond what it could handle.  The music was far too complex and the original PDFs, while they were beautifully engraved, had different notation elements that PlayScore just could not recognize.  I wasn’t entirely surprised by this, and of the eight pieces I had to reengrave, I only ended up using PlayScore on four of them, again with some serious editing.  On the other four, after seeing the musicxml conversion, I knew it would take too long to edit what PlayScore gave me vs just doing it by hand myself.

Music notation engraving, I feel, like any other kind of craftsmanship, focuses on how well you use the tools at your disposal.  Anyone can buy a saw or a hammer, or a music notation software for that matter, but the real skill comes from using these tools, over and over again, to perfect your craft and then finding and developing new tools to supplement those core competencies.  As I have used PlayScore 2, like those other programs I mentioned before, I have found that not only is it helpful, but it has opened up other workflows and possibilities for me.  Is it perfect? No, but knowing how to use a new tool and what its limitations are,  means you can get more and more out of that tool and know when it’ll be helpful.

So, if you, like many others I’m sure, are looking at old catalogs of pieces from decades ago, wondering what to do with them, or think, since there are only PDFs that nothing can be changed or altered, it might be time to look at something like PlayScore 2 and dream of what it could help you with.  There are other music scanning programs, but the cost ($60 per year or a monthly subscription) and features it offers might just make it the newest tool—or, if I may use a slight pun, the newest piece of playground equipment—for you to enjoy!