The OSME Sight Reading Practice Generator Prototype

Whether you are a professional or a beginner, sight reading is an absolute must for making music. During music lessons, this is taught right from the start and is practiced and perfected until you become a professional. This raises the question for us: how can we help? Our solution: The Open Sheet Music Education exercise generator!

As part of our project, OSME, we have developed an exercise generator. Its task is to create personalized sheet reading exercises for musicians. After being in talks with different music teachers, we came to the conclusion that this generator can be very helpful for practicing sight reading. The “Sight Reading Practice Generator” provides different settings that allow you to create a variety of exercises that meet the exact needs of a particular musician.

What can I do with the OSME Exercise Generator?

The first thing you can do is name your exercise, enter yourself as a “composer” for example, and specify the tempo/beats per minute (BPM). Amongst other things, this should help the teacher/student to organize and categorize many different exercises.

In the General Settings, you can specify how many measures you want to be in the exercise. Here you can also generate bar and key. You can also select whether the articulation should be staccato or tenuto.

In the instrument settings you can adjust the preset instruments (in this example it’s the trumpet), their lowest or highest ranges (for example C1 to A3), as well as the clefs (for example G or F clefs).

Our practice generator also has additional settings for experts to further refine the settings. Under “Pitch Settings” you can determine which notes should appear in the exercise. Apart from that, intervals (such as prime, second, third, etc.) and tone lengths (whole, half, quarter, etc.) can also be inserted.

Once you are happy with all your preferences, the exercises are generated at the touch of a button and displayed on the screen using Open Sheet Music Display (OSMD). The exercises on display can then be saved or printed by the musicians. This simple process can then be repeated over and over again.