"ENGRAVE - An expert system that understands and generates musical notation"

Abstract

ENGRAVE is an expert system that performs the work of a music engraver. The system takes a digital image of a conductor's score as input and produces engraved-quality copies of the individual parts.

ENGRAVE consists of a vision system and a graphics system. The vision system contains a low-level section that recognizes features and a visual expert system that understands their meanings. Under the current computer vision paradigm, low-level processing is general-purpose while domain knowledge is used only in "high-level" routines. We hypothesize that domain knowledge is necessary at the low level as well for a vision system to work reliably. The visual expert uses a frame-based approach to explain the objects round in music. In the graphics system, we make use of the concept of "spatial planning" to generate correct musical notation. We show by example that spatial planning can be applied to other domains.