MusicSynth: An Automated Pipeline for Generating Violin Fingerboard Animations from Sheet Music Using Optical Music Recognition

TL;DR

MusicSynth is an open-source web tool that automatically generates violin fingerboard animations from sheet music images or digital scores, integrating existing open-source tools into a seamless pipeline.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, fully browser-based pipeline that converts sheet music images into animated violin fingerboard tutorials without manual input.

Findings

Correctly identified 91.2% of notes in printed music

Assigned correct finger positions 99.1% of the time with digital scores

Is the first tool to automatically generate violin fingerboard animations from sheet music

Abstract

Learning the violin is harder than it looks. Unlike piano keys or guitar frets, the violin neck has no markings at all, so a beginner cannot tell by looking where to place each finger. MusicSynth is an open-source web tool that tries to fix that: user uploads a photo of any violin sheet music (or a digital score file), and the system automatically produces a video showing a violin fingerboard with each note highlighted at the right moment -- no software to install, no manual note entry required. The system connects three existing open-source tools into one pipeline: an optical music recognition (OMR) library reads the notes from the uploaded image, a MusicXML parser extracts timing information from digital scores, and a video renderer draws the fingerboard frame by frame. The only part built from scratch is the lookup table that maps each musical note to a string and finger position on the violin. Tested across 110 public-domain violin scores, MusicSynth correctly identified 91.2\,\% of notes in clean printed music and assigned the right finger position 99.1\,\% of the time when given a digital score file. To the author's knowledge, no freely available tool currently turns a sheet music image into an animated violin fingerboard tutorial automatically and in a single browser-based step.