project idea (possibly using AI): record a take of songs from old sheet music books
Starting with something like the Grange book of sheet music below and record them ... Apparently the music can get to midi via Play Score 2, and other programs can could sing the lyrics.
or better yet, if anyone wants to perform the songs and upload them to the archive, you could link it into a review of the book.
https://archive.org/details/grangemelodies00nati/page/n1/mode/2up
Do you know people that would be up for this, maybe as a contest?
we could have prizes, we could have in-person concerts with multiple groups, we could generate lots of open/free music.
We would bring 100 year old music to a new audiences. We might be a bunch of people singing.
I would really like to hear shape-note singing like they do at Bread and Puppet.
https://archive.org/details/present_joys_sacred_harp
https://archive.org/details/evangelicalmusic00hick/page/n7/mode/2up
(if anyone wants to run such a project, please come forward!)
@brewsterkahle sounds like an idea for a shared task e.g. at TENOR 2026 https://soundscore.org/TENOR26
I've just read that as in any other field, Optical Music Recognition needs more annotated ground truth data (see e.g. https://apacha.github.io/OMR-Datasets/ for what is out there), and as in most other fields, the IA is an outstanding source with such potential.
