Music recognition is a type of MIR (Music Information Retrieval ), the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music.

OMR (Optical Music Recognition), also referred to as Music OCR, (Optical Character Recognition ), refers to the capturing of musical semantics from a scanned in page of sheet music or printed scores. Specialised OMR software can recognise individual notes and symbols and interpret their musical meaning. The results are stored in a musical representation language known as GUIDO. Lyrics can be recognised using OCR.

This written information can be converted into an editable form, for example MusicXML, and can also be played as an audio track, by conversion into a file format such as MIDI. OMR also allows music to be stored in a database and retrieved using a music search engine or analysed with automatic musical analysis tools.

Some programs also include the option of a virtual singer, to enable to user to hear both music and lyrics together.

Related methods include: Content based sound retrieval, Data modelling, Sound encoding – MIDI and Text recognition.