# Optical Music Recognition of Jazz Lead Sheets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Understanding Optical Music Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03608/) (2019)
- [miditok: A Python package for MIDI file tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17202/) (2023)
- [Sheet Music Transformer: End-To-End Optical Music Recognition Beyond Monophonic Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07596/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Dataset for the Recognition of Historical and Handwritten Music Scores in Western Notation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18436/) (2026)
- [Audio-to-Score Transcription using Pre-trained Features, Data Augmentation, and the New SheetSage-A2S Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06165/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we address the challenge of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) for handwritten jazz lead sheets, a widely used musical score type that encodes melody and chords. The task is challenging due to the presence of chords, a score component not handled by existing OMR systems, and the high variability and quality issues associated with handwritten images. Our contribution is two-fold. We present a novel dataset consisting of 293 handwritten jazz lead sheets of 163 unique pieces, amounting to 2021 total staves aligned with Humdrum **kern and MusicXML ground truth scores. We also supply synthetic score images generated from the ground truth. The second contribution is the development of an OMR model for jazz lead sheets. We discuss specific tokenisation choices related to our kind of data, and the advantages of using synthetic scores and pretrained models. We publicly release all code, data, and models.