History First published digital scan of music scores by David Prerau in 1971 Due to significant differences, this term should no longer be used. In the past it has, misleadingly, also been called 'music optical character recognition'. MIDI (for playback) and MusicXML (for page layout). Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. The goal of OMR is to teach the computer to read and interpret sheet music and produce a machine-readable version of the written music score. Optical music recognition ( OMR) is a field of research that investigates how to computationally read musical notation in documents.
