[im3w1l]

I recently used a funny workflow involving MusicXML. I wanted to learn a song that I only had sheet music for and not being much of a sightsinger, I had manually input the sheet music into Vocaloid so I could sing along with it (OCR exists but in my experience is in such a sorry state and requires so many manual fix ups that for the moment it's easier to type it in manually. As for enterring the data I have experimented and I'm significantly faster and more accurate with a piano roll than typing note names in musescore).

Now as this song had nonsense lyrics and many repetitions and almost-repetitions, the structure of the song didn't quite pop out to me, so what I did was export a midi from vocaloid that I opened musescore. From musescore I then exported it as MusicXML. I opened that in Notepad++ for the sole purpose of pretty printing the xml to normalize the texual representation and saved it right back. I took that and opened it in a jupyter notebook where I scraped it for <measure> elements with regular expressions and then I searched for repeating ones, that I assembled into repeating segments and sub-segments.

This helped me memorize the song.

What I liked about MusicXML was that it was self-documenting enough that I didn't need to reference documentation and I could find candidates for normalization quite easy (for instance I didn't care about directions of stems or inferred dynamics).

A gotcha is that Musescore 4 has a bug where it doesn't show the "midi import" where you can adjust the duration quantization, this didn't matter to me for this song, but I did bite me once in the past when opening a midi from Vocaloid. Musescore 3 works. Without playing around with that there can be an issue where it infers 16th notes as staccato 8th notes and similar.