Pullman Virtual Museum	CURRENT EXHIBITS	The Music of Pullman

Sheet Music in Celebration of Pullman -- MIDI Creation

We owned all of the twelve tunes selected to be a part of this exhibit, so we carefully scanned the originals as 300-400 dpi images in TIFF format, no compression. The TIFF images were then "read' into Visiv's SharpEye 2 optical musical scanning software program. Depending on the cleanliness of the original, this process had an error rate of 70-95%, with Pullman Porter Man having only 20 errors and Tourists in a Pullman Palace Car 223. All errors had to be manually corrected, using SharpEye's very nice editing features. All stanzas were inspected on every musical selection.

The assembled OCR score, once corrected, was then exported into MIDI format, where it was then opened up in Myriad's Harmony Assistant program. This was preferred, because it allowed a very sophisticated series of instruments and playback options. We selected instruments that sounded like upright Victorian pianos; in many cases, the lyrics line is played back as a honky-tonk piano, while the supporting bass and treble lines were kept to more sedate parlor pianos. The reverb is what we imagine these tunes would have sounded like had then been played in the Hotel Florence (with its Minton tile lobby) in 1885. The files were then exported into mp3 format.