Teaching computers to read old handwritten sheet music

Libraries and archives hold thousands of digitized historical sheet music pages that remain unsearchable and unreadable to machines. This dataset provides 1,309 pages of primarily handwritten scores with complete MusicXML transcriptions and symbol annotations—the largest handwritten music collection released to date. It comes from real memory institutions, not synthetic data, making it suitable for training both end-to-end and object detection systems for optical music recognition.