Score following is the realtime synchronization of a live musician playing a score with the score itself and decoding of expressive parameters of the musician on the fly. The interest of score following is usually twofold:

1. Technically for realtime alignment of audio signals to a transcription of the music score, and
2. Musically for interpreting electronic music scores conform to live performance.

Score following is the ingredient of many pieces produced at IRCAM. Since the inception of the project, multiple generations of score following systems have been developed, initially at the IMTR Team and since 2011 at the Musical Representations Team. The latest incarnation of score following at IRCAM is Antescofo.

See a Video history of score following algorithms.

Arshia Cont, Research and Development
Philippe Cuvillier, Ph.D candidate

Serge Lemouton, Gilbert Nouno, Benoit Meudic, Chris Lebreton, José Miguel Fernandez.

Marco Stroppa, Philippe Manoury, Pierre Boulez, Lara Morciano, Vassos Nicolaou, Richard Dudas, Andrea Agostini, Keith Hamel, Larry Nelson, Emmanuel Nunes, Julia Blondeau.

Nicola Montecchio, A. Cont. A Unified Approach to Real Time Audio-to-Score and Audio-to-Audio Alignment Using Sequential Montecarlo Inference Techniques. To appear in Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2011, Prague, Czech Republic.

Arshia Cont, A coupled duration-focused architecture for realtime music to score alignment. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Vol. 32(6), Pp. 974-987, June 2010. (preprint) (bibtex)

Arshia Cont. ANTESCOFO: Anticipatory Synchronization and Control of Interactive Parameters in Computer Music", Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), August 2008, Belfast, Ireland.

Arshia Cont. Realtime Audio to Score Alignment for Polyphonic Music Instruments Using Sparse Non-negative constraints and Hierarchical HMMs», IEEE International Conference on Acoustics and Speech Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2006, Toulouse, France.

Diemo Schwarz, Arshia Cont and Norbert Schnell. «From Boulez to Ballads: Training IRCAM’s Score Follower», Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), August 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Arshia Cont, Diemo Schwarz and Norbert Schnell, «Training Ircam’s Score Follower», IEEE International Conference on Acoustics and Speech Signal Processing (ICASSP), March 2005, Philadelphia, USA.

Nicola Orio, Serge Lemouton, Diemo Schwarz and Norbert Schnell. «Score Following: State of the Art and New Developments», Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), May 2003, Montreal, Canada.

Nicola Orio and François Déchelle. «Score Following Using Spectral Analysis and Hidden Markov Models», Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), August 2001, Havana, Cuba.

Miller Puckette and Cort Lippe. «Score Following in Practice», Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 1992, San Jose, USA.

Miller Puckette. «EXPLODE: A User Interface for Sequencing and Score Following», Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 1990, Glasgow, Scotland.

Barry Vercoe and Miller Puckette, Synthetic Rehearsal: Training the Synthetic Performer, Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 1985.

Barry Vercoe. «The Synthetic Performer in the Context of Live Performance», Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 1984, Paris, France.