Large-scale symbolic melody datasets are essential for data-driven music information retrieval and generation, yet traditional-style Chinese melodies remain scattered across heterogeneous score formats and image sources. Existing extraction pipelines typically focus on single modalities—either MIDI archives or standard staff notation—and lack unified handling for numbered musical notation (Jianpu) and automated quality assurance. We propose the Multi-Source Melody Pipeline (MSMP), a systems-integration prototype whose front-end admits MIDI, MusicXML, Jianpu images, and staff images, and whose back-end converges on a standardized event-level representation; the present case study exercises the image branch—in particular the Jianpu branch, through a Gemini-2.5-flash vision language model—and treats the MIDI/MusicXML ingestion paths as architectural slots that are wired in but not experimentally validated in this submission. The system employs notation-aware routing to direct score images to appropriate backends (a VLM for Jianpu and rule-based OMR for staff) and enforces a structural validity gate (schema conformance plus at least one melodic track with at least one musical event) on every candidate segment. Validation on a 292-page representative prototype cohort yielded an 80.1% structural-acceptance rate—explicitly not a transcription accuracy number—and a newly added ground-truth benchmark on 50 manually annotated Jianpu pages reports 95.8% time-signature exact accuracy, 77.1% tonal-pitch-class key accuracy, 100% tempo agreement within ±5 BPM, and, on a 10-page note-level subset, a mean first-16-note pitch F1 of 0.898 (octave-sensitive) with a Symbol Error Rate of 0.150. A companion 10-page K = 3 self-consistency audit indicates that metadata errors are systematic rather than stochastic. This work, therefore, contributes a reproducible integration architecture and a quantitative baseline on the Jianpu branch, rather than a new OMR algorithm, a new dataset release, or a fully benchmarked multi-format corpus; ongoing work addresses out-of-distribution classifier evaluation, comparison against dedicated Jianpu OMR baselines, and release of a copyright-cleared corpus.
Zhou et al. (Thu,) studied this question.