High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Music OCR is the application of optical character recognition to interpret sheet music or printed scores into editable and, often, playable form. Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. MIDI (for playback) and MusicXML (for page layout).Early research into recognition of printed sheet music was performed at the graduate level in the late 1960's at MIT and other institutions. Successive efforts were made to localize and remove musical staff lines leaving symbols to be recognized and parsed. The first commercial music-scanning product, MIDISCAN, was released in 1991 by Musitek corporation.