🎵 DeepMusic-OCR: How AI Learns to Read Sheet Music
We adapted DeepSeek-OCR a model built for reading text and taught it to read the 2D language of music notation.
Here’s what the paper is really about 👇
Thread 🧵
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Unlike normal text, music is two-dimensional:
• Vertical = chords / simultaneity
• Horizontal = rhythm / time
Traditional OMR systems try to segment symbols.
DeepMusic-OCR doesn’t.
It reads the entire score at once.
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🔍 The Encoder
DeepMusic-OCR uses a vision encoder redesigned for music:
• 8×8 fine-patch resolution for tiny details
• 2D positional encoding aligned with staff lines
• Dual attention: local (notes) + global (layout)
• Pretrained on millions of synthetic sheets
This lets the model capture both symbols and structure.
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🎼 The Decoder
Instead of outputting words, the decoder outputs musical events, like:
<note:F#5-quarter>
<clef:G>
<key:D-major>
It also handles:
• Polyphony
• Chords
• Multiple voices
…thanks to a Mixture-of-Experts architecture.
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🧠Musical Grammar Built In
DeepMusic-OCR isn’t allowed to output impossible music.
A “musical grammar loss” penalizes:
• Broken measures
• Impossible rhythms
• Invalid symbols
This gives the model a sense of musical correctness.
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🖼️ Training Data
Since real OMR data is limited, we generated millions of training examples from:
• MusicXML
• MuseScore
• IMSLP
Each score is rendered in multiple engraving styles, with distortions to simulate scanned pages.
Synthetic data = the breakthrough.
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⚡ Results
With ~200 tokens per page, DeepMusic-OCR achieves:
• High symbol accuracy
• Consistent measures
• Strong transfer to handwritten music
And it does so at a fraction of the compute cost of traditional OMR systems.
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🌍 Why This Matters
DeepMusic-OCR enables:
• Digitization of classical archives
• Large-scale symbolic music analysis
• Conditioning generative models with real scores
• Education tools for musicians
This isn’t just OCR it’s visual-symbolic music understanding.
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