Using musical features for watermarking music scores

Abstract

Fast and easy access to digital data via the Internet has changed and is still changing our society. The amount of data offered on the Internet is increasing constantly. Also, the distribution of copyrighted data plays an important role. To protect this copyrighted digital data, new methods are being developed. One of those is watermarking. Nowadays, music scores are in digital format. Although music scores can be considered as images, image watermarking techniques applied to music scores degrade them. Therefore, we propose a method which does not change the shape of the musical symbols. Our solution respects the content of music scores by modifying features implicitly given in the music notation. The advantages are increased robustness and reduced visual impact. In particular, visibility (or transparency) is an important issue: Some changes might fatigue musicians mentally and they even don't know why. Considering robustness, a watermark should not be removed during the copying processes which are commonly used by musicians. By choosing suitable features, a blind or oblivious detection of the watermark is possible: an original music score is not required and a watermark can be read directly from a given watermarked music score.