6 ms·

How the iPad can revolutionize music notation software

19 points by dgurney 16y ago

georgieporgie 16y ago
I suspect the reason that so few -- and such poor -- options exist is that the market is too small.
- baddox 16y ago
  I don't know. There are many examples of good digital audio workstation applications. Some of them (I'm thinking Cubase) even contain a music notation subsystem. I think the market for an affordable music notation application with a refreshingly usable interface (for the iPad or otherwise) would be sufficient.
- dgurney 16y ago
  I'm not so sure about that (the initial comment)... there are a lot of musicians out there. Even a casual composer like myself (who only composes every couple weeks when I feel like it) owns a copy of Finale. And almost all of my music-oriented friends do too. Definitely a smaller market than, say, Quicken, but I bet it's still pretty big.
- oblique63 16y ago
  The market is there, it's just that no one really pays attention to it. The options currently out there are all pricey (for the 'starving artist' types that musicians tend to be anyway), bloated (the latest Guitar Pro has Effects Pedals for crying out loud), and just expect musicians to instinctively know what to do when given nearly half a screenful of buttons. Just the other day I noticed a Sibelius manual at my local bookstore that was the size of a phone book! If you're a songwriter, all you want to do is basically get to the point where you could record a demo of your stuff; the last thing you're gonna want to do, is waste your time going through a huge tome just to write your stuff down. I'm actually working on a startup that's looking to solve this problem, and we're fully confident that good, affordable, and simple yet well-thought-out music notation software is something that musicians everywhere are going to have a huge sigh of relief over. We're even applying to the summer YC session in hopes of accomplishing this faster :) oh, and our url is http://www.tabrat.com http://www.tabrat.com by the way (still only a splash page though).
baddox 16y ago
That could be good. I'm fascinated by music notation software, but I've always found Sibelius and Finale unusable. Lilypond[1] is a pretty good notation language, but it has no interface. Perhaps the iPad app could generate LilyPond code. http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour
- dgurney 16y ago
  good call.. I'll look into that
mullr 16y ago
Replace "tap" with "click" in your post. How is the iPad better than doing the same things with the mouse? I don't dispute that a very nice app could be created, but I question whether the iPad itself enables any of those things. Further, a finger is a very imprecise input device. For music, precision is very important. Even a mouse is not precise enough for lots of things I do when I use DAW software. Music notation is one place where I think pen-based input would be useful. It's precise and the input language is tightly scoped enough that the recognition problem is solvable. There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any faster way. Recording-based apps (midi or otherwise) are always at the mercy of the performer. And unless you're superhuman (I'm not), you have to spend a long time quantizing and correcting the transcribed rhythm. It's real bummer. I would much rather scrawl the notes and know that they'll be nicely typeset out the other end.
- moe 16y ago
  There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any faster way. One word: Keyboard. This is one thing that I really love about soundtrackers (e.g. renoise[1]). You just type in your notes while seamlessly tabbing between different tracks/instruments. This makes experimentation faster and more pleasant than any other method I've come across. It is sad that clumsy point-and-click interfaces are still the norm in most music software. Dragging around little rectangles on a grid is horrible. [1] http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matrix.jpg http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matri...
  - spiralganglion 16y ago
    Sibelius is almost there. Almost. They're still expecting you to use a mouse for some tasks, but you can get a lot done with just the keyboard.
- dgurney 16y ago
  You make a good point about replacing "tap" with "click," but while the two seem similar conceptually (ie. either way you get "input --> reaction"), I think the actual experience is completely different. With clicking, you make an input and see a reaction elsewhere (on the screen). But with tapping, the input and reaction occur in the same place. And I think that direct connection is key. Playing music is by nature a tactile experience, so composing in a tactile manner brings you that much closer to the end product. Granted, I'm a musician myself, so I could be biased. But I think pretty much anyone can enjoy the idea of adding notes to a staff and seeing music come out the other end. The more direct that process is, the better. In terms of precision, I find the iPad to be plenty accurate, for these purposes anyway. The staff would have to be blown up a bit, but after that I don't see note accuracy being a problem. Plus, this would probably be a more limited program and wouldn't be as applicable to professionals who need that pixel-by-pixel level of accuracy (think finger painting vs. photoshop...).
ugh 16y ago
I know absolutely nothing about music notation software (and nearly nothing about making music) but wouldn’t the easiest way of getting notes into any computer be to connect a midi keyboard and to start playing? I mean, those are dedicated devices, tailored for just that use. They were created for that purpose. I guess you might be unable to play a keyboard at speed but you could still enter the notes without duration with a keyboard (that could be a two step process — press the note and press some key for the duration afterwards). It seems absurd to me that you would enter notes with the normal keyboard or the mouse or by tapping. What am I missing?
- spiralganglion 16y ago
  A whole bunch of things. First, background: I've recorded over 24 albums, written 5 scores, play over a dozen instruments, and have composed thousands of pages of music in various notational programs using a ton of different input methods. Ok, let's go. A midi keyboard takes up space. It also takes up more space the better it gets. If you want a 3 or 5 or 7 octave keyboard, you need to have that sort of room in your work area. Imagine an entire piano keyboard on your desk. Even a smaller keyboard takes up more space than another regular computer keyboard, and having a second one of those is difficult enough to work with. Space issues aside, there's the issue of workflows. I've yet to find a music notation program with an anything approaching an elegant flow. For each passage of music that you'd like to write, there are a ton of variables that need to be expressed and recorded, and the midi keyboard only handles a few of these. You need to capture pitches of multiple notes (chords), durations, accents, articulations, voicing (for multiple parts on the same staff, as in choral music), dynamics, and many other things. Many of these are optional, and only used when needed, but even the most fundamental ones are often a chore to enter. A midi keyboard is great for entering note pitches, but as you described, playing in time (at speed) seems to be the only way to avoid entering all the note-lengths by hand. Playing in time has its own problems, too. You have to match the data to a grid structure. But the grid structure needs to be strict enough to catch the subtleties of the performance, and flexible enough to compensate for human-error. Otherwise, you'll be back to manual data-entry to correct all the parsing mistakes. These constraints also depend largely on the person playing the keyboard. On the other hand, an alternating two-step process isn't any faster with a midi keyboard than a computer keyboard. Midi keyboards were not created for data entry. They were created for live performance, controlling other dedicated devices that created music, like synthesizers. They've been co-opted to enter data for notation, and while they can accelerate the process somewhat, there are shortcomings on the software side. It is also largely dependent on the type of music being transcribed. I am very much in favour of an iPad notation program. I've been thinking about that since last summer, but I haven't had time to make one myself. If someone tackles this problem and comes up with an elegant solution, they'll have no noteworthy competition on either side of the PC/Post-PC divide. Pun intended.

19 points by dgurney 16y ago

georgieporgie 16y ago

I suspect the reason that so few -- and such poor -- options exist is that the market is too small.

baddox 16y ago
I don't know. There are many examples of good digital audio workstation applications. Some of them (I'm thinking Cubase) even contain a music notation subsystem. I think the market for an affordable music notation application with a refreshingly usable interface (for the iPad or otherwise) would be sufficient.
dgurney 16y ago
I'm not so sure about that (the initial comment)... there are a lot of musicians out there. Even a casual composer like myself (who only composes every couple weeks when I feel like it) owns a copy of Finale. And almost all of my music-oriented friends do too. Definitely a smaller market than, say, Quicken, but I bet it's still pretty big.
oblique63 16y ago
The market is there, it's just that no one really pays attention to it. The options currently out there are all pricey (for the 'starving artist' types that musicians tend to be anyway), bloated (the latest Guitar Pro has Effects Pedals for crying out loud), and just expect musicians to instinctively know what to do when given nearly half a screenful of buttons. Just the other day I noticed a Sibelius manual at my local bookstore that was the size of a phone book! If you're a songwriter, all you want to do is basically get to the point where you could record a demo of your stuff; the last thing you're gonna want to do, is waste your time going through a huge tome just to write your stuff down. I'm actually working on a startup that's looking to solve this problem, and we're fully confident that good, affordable, and simple yet well-thought-out music notation software is something that musicians everywhere are going to have a huge sigh of relief over. We're even applying to the summer YC session in hopes of accomplishing this faster :) oh, and our url is http://www.tabrat.com http://www.tabrat.com by the way (still only a splash page though).

baddox 16y ago

That could be good. I'm fascinated by music notation software, but I've always found Sibelius and Finale unusable. Lilypond[1] is a pretty good notation language, but it has no interface. Perhaps the iPad app could generate LilyPond code. http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour

dgurney 16y ago
good call.. I'll look into that

mullr 16y ago

Replace "tap" with "click" in your post. How is the iPad better than doing the same things with the mouse? I don't dispute that a very nice app could be created, but I question whether the iPad itself enables any of those things. Further, a finger is a very imprecise input device. For music, precision is very important. Even a mouse is not precise enough for lots of things I do when I use DAW software. Music notation is one place where I think pen-based input would be useful. It's precise and the input language is tightly scoped enough that the recognition problem is solvable. There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any faster way. Recording-based apps (midi or otherwise) are always at the mercy of the performer. And unless you're superhuman (I'm not), you have to spend a long time quantizing and correcting the transcribed rhythm. It's real bummer. I would much rather scrawl the notes and know that they'll be nicely typeset out the other end.

moe 16y ago
There's also no existing system that lets you input musical notes in any faster way. One word: Keyboard. This is one thing that I really love about soundtrackers (e.g. renoise[1]). You just type in your notes while seamlessly tabbing between different tracks/instruments. This makes experimentation faster and more pleasant than any other method I've come across. It is sad that clumsy point-and-click interfaces are still the norm in most music software. Dragging around little rectangles on a grid is horrible. [1] http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matrix.jpg http://www.renoise.com/uploads/images/screenshots/rns25matri...
- spiralganglion 16y ago
  Sibelius is almost there. Almost. They're still expecting you to use a mouse for some tasks, but you can get a lot done with just the keyboard.
dgurney 16y ago
You make a good point about replacing "tap" with "click," but while the two seem similar conceptually (ie. either way you get "input --> reaction"), I think the actual experience is completely different. With clicking, you make an input and see a reaction elsewhere (on the screen). But with tapping, the input and reaction occur in the same place. And I think that direct connection is key. Playing music is by nature a tactile experience, so composing in a tactile manner brings you that much closer to the end product. Granted, I'm a musician myself, so I could be biased. But I think pretty much anyone can enjoy the idea of adding notes to a staff and seeing music come out the other end. The more direct that process is, the better. In terms of precision, I find the iPad to be plenty accurate, for these purposes anyway. The staff would have to be blown up a bit, but after that I don't see note accuracy being a problem. Plus, this would probably be a more limited program and wouldn't be as applicable to professionals who need that pixel-by-pixel level of accuracy (think finger painting vs. photoshop...).

ugh 16y ago

I know absolutely nothing about music notation software (and nearly nothing about making music) but wouldn’t the easiest way of getting notes into any computer be to connect a midi keyboard and to start playing? I mean, those are dedicated devices, tailored for just that use. They were created for that purpose. I guess you might be unable to play a keyboard at speed but you could still enter the notes without duration with a keyboard (that could be a two step process — press the note and press some key for the duration afterwards). It seems absurd to me that you would enter notes with the normal keyboard or the mouse or by tapping. What am I missing?

spiralganglion 16y ago
A whole bunch of things. First, background: I've recorded over 24 albums, written 5 scores, play over a dozen instruments, and have composed thousands of pages of music in various notational programs using a ton of different input methods. Ok, let's go. A midi keyboard takes up space. It also takes up more space the better it gets. If you want a 3 or 5 or 7 octave keyboard, you need to have that sort of room in your work area. Imagine an entire piano keyboard on your desk. Even a smaller keyboard takes up more space than another regular computer keyboard, and having a second one of those is difficult enough to work with. Space issues aside, there's the issue of workflows. I've yet to find a music notation program with an anything approaching an elegant flow. For each passage of music that you'd like to write, there are a ton of variables that need to be expressed and recorded, and the midi keyboard only handles a few of these. You need to capture pitches of multiple notes (chords), durations, accents, articulations, voicing (for multiple parts on the same staff, as in choral music), dynamics, and many other things. Many of these are optional, and only used when needed, but even the most fundamental ones are often a chore to enter. A midi keyboard is great for entering note pitches, but as you described, playing in time (at speed) seems to be the only way to avoid entering all the note-lengths by hand. Playing in time has its own problems, too. You have to match the data to a grid structure. But the grid structure needs to be strict enough to catch the subtleties of the performance, and flexible enough to compensate for human-error. Otherwise, you'll be back to manual data-entry to correct all the parsing mistakes. These constraints also depend largely on the person playing the keyboard. On the other hand, an alternating two-step process isn't any faster with a midi keyboard than a computer keyboard. Midi keyboards were not created for data entry. They were created for live performance, controlling other dedicated devices that created music, like synthesizers. They've been co-opted to enter data for notation, and while they can accelerate the process somewhat, there are shortcomings on the software side. It is also largely dependent on the type of music being transcribed. I am very much in favour of an iPad notation program. I've been thinking about that since last summer, but I haven't had time to make one myself. If someone tackles this problem and comes up with an elegant solution, they'll have no noteworthy competition on either side of the PC/Post-PC divide. Pun intended.