Mozart2000 : Music reading and piano playing robot

Abstract: Many industries have been transformed to better perform in today’s digital age. In this project a solution for digitalizing printed sheet music as well as automating piano playing is researched, developed and built. The project was divided into three sub-systems, the first focusing on the digitalizing of sheet music, the second on identifying and classifying the notes and the third on playing the piano. These were later combined to form a demonstrator called Mozart2000, or M2k. The result was a robot which could determine the note pitch of an arbitrary note, or note combination, written in common music notation, and furthermore play these on the piano. The algorithm is based of off finding coordinates for stafflines and notes using image processing. Programming was done in Python with some functions extracted from the library OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision). The piano playing mechanism uses solenoids and lever arms, controlled by electrical signals from a Raspberry Pi. Due to scope in budget and time some restrictions were made. The note range for the robot was limited to one octave, meaning 8 piano keys. Moreover, other musical information such as rhythmical and coloring were overlooked and set to a predetermined value. For the digitalizing part, a camera was used, taking a snapshot of one musical bar. The final solution however can be expanded to include additional keys and music segments by replicating the existing mechanism.