A Method for Measuring the Difficulty of Music Scores

While the difficulty of the music can be classified by a variety of standard, conventional methods are classified by the subjective judgment based on the experience of many musicians or conductors. Music score is difficult to evaluate as there is no quantitative criterion to determine the degree of difficulty. In this paper, we propose a new classification method for determining the degree of difficulty of the music. In order to determine the degree of difficulty, we convert the score, which is expressed as a traditional music score, into electronic music sheet. Moreover, we calculate information about the elements needed to play sheet music by distance of notes, tempo, and quantifying the ease of interpretation. Calculating a degree of difficulty of the entire music via the numerical data, we suggest the difficulty evaluation of the score, and show the difficulty of music through experiments.