What’s next in the evolution of music notation? In an era as maniacally inventive as ours, I would be foolish to claim to know what’s coming, but there are some clear changes and trends. It’s a bit like watching the fog blow around and trying to figure out how the air is moving.
Quick recap
In Part 1 of this article I talked about notation’s origins, as communities started to capture and exchange musical works. In the West, these communities were early churches and monasteries using manuscripts as the medium. Over the next millennium, notation became standardized and fueled the development of a rich body of works. The medium transitioned to engraving and printing, with a corresponding quantum leap in sharing. The availability and exchange of these works defined a musical culture and bound it together. Today, even though audio recordings now dominate popular consumption, notation continues to play a strong role. Notation lets us focus on musical ideas, rather than on specific performances.
In Part 2, I talked about the evolution of software for creating music notation, and its initial focus on the printed page as the ultimate destination of a work. Ease of creation, sharing and collaboration workflow remain secondary concerns in desktop notation software, however. At present, most scorewriting tools still seem to be designed for a solitary, expert auteur with deep pockets. In contrast, the Internet is running riot in almost every other medium, as it satisfies the long-latent desire of our culture to instantly create, share, and comment on every kind of creative work at little or no cost. The next quantum leap in sharing has already taken place, but music notation is only now inviting itself to the party.
Our present time asks us to rethink the capabilities of music notation, the software that creates and delivers it, and the business ecosystem around it. The Internet and the web have replaced the scribe, the printing press and indeed printing devices altogether. Technology has destroyed the scarcity of information, and the industries we formerly built to exploit this scarcity are shrinking and changing. What’s next?
Music creation will be seamlessly joined to creative communities
The intersection of music-making, community, and communications technology is exploding today across the music business, changing many of its facets. Noteflight is one of the new companies working at this intersection and will be joined by many other organizations and businesses. Noteflight’s business is based on a simple set of premises: 1) the ultimate goal of music creation is sharing, 2) creative communities have a desire and a need to share, 3) the technology of sharing information has reached new levels of ease and power. We see other examples of this trend in sites such as Indaba Music, IMSLP, Kompoz, Wikiphonia, and others.
Given that everyday technology can now deliver a powerful score writing/viewing experience in any web browser or mobile device, music notation software is finally able to support communication, collaboration and community in a way it has not done before: by situating musical documents in the cloud, and integrating sharing and social features directly into the tool itself. As a starting point one need only look at the best and simplest ways people share other digital documents, and apply these techniques straight-up to digital scores. For example, a score in Noteflight has a URL, like any other web page. Share that URL and you have shared the score (assuming you have given permission). Bookmark that URL and you can easily find the score again.
An orientation towards sharing and social interaction also changes a tool’s design priorities, favoring ease of creation and interaction over extreme power and control. The world already has tools for laboriously crafting a perfect, final edition of a score, destined for the printer. Tools like Noteflight, on the other hand, are designed for capturing musical ideas quickly and allowing them to move around in the world, whether big or small, rough or perfect. They are also designed to satisfy the collective needs of a group, not just the needs of individual users.
In some ways this isn’t a reimagining of notation: it’s a return to the roots. In a previous post I wrote, “Notation created a musical web of composers and performers, feeding off of each other’s ideas and techniques”. Tools like Noteflight are allowing that same musical web to flow through the wires of our modern-day network, gathering renewed energy as it flows.
New publishing channels for artists and creative communities
I believe that the new community-oriented and web-based generation of notation tools such as Noteflight will change the face of publishing in sheet music, in a way that accords with other changes in the music business. As has been the case with audio recordings for some time now, artists will finally be able to deliver their music directly to their fans with the barest need for intermediaries. As with audio, the value of sheet music will change in our culture. The new value will likely be based more on the relationship between creator and performer, and less on the ownership of a physical asset. Less expertise will be required to provide one’s audience with notated music, and the low financial barrier will stimulate more ideas on how that music can be offered and used by creators and consumers.
We will also see more of the interesting phenomenon of “collective publishing”, something that has been difficult and rare in the past. User-generated libraries of content have enormous commercial value, and ways will be found to offer these in a legal framework that fairly compensates rights-holders.
Publishers are not blind to the commercial potential of such content, even though there is no way for them to “make it happen”: it has to arise organically. Take the fascinating example of the Real Book, probably the best-known “fake book” for jazz tunes used by working musicians around the world. When I went to music school in the late 1970s, the Real Book was an illicit commodity sold by street hustlers for what the market would bear. In fact, I bought my copy on Mass. Ave. in Boston from a guy whose other main business was selling weed to Berklee students. (For the record, I passed on the weed, have never attempted to smoke the Real Book, and went to New England Conservatory rather than Berklee.)
People were willing to pay a lot for the Real Book, because the quality and utility of the charts was far better than the stiff, over-arranged song sheets that could be bought legally from music publishers. This changed suddenly in the 90s, however, when the Real Book went both commercial and legal! Today, the Real Book is published by Hal Leonard Corporation, for a lower price (in 1980 dollars) than I paid on the street. The composers of the songs are compensated. Errors have been corrected. The printing isn’t all slanty and sketchy and the pages don’t fall out. It’s an unusual and happy ending to this kind of story, and one that I think will become more common. Had Real Book owners been sued RIAA-style for hundreds of thousands of dollars, everyone would be worse off.
There’s a lesson here, and to up the ante in a digital era, publishers will have to do much more than simply offer a product that is legal and priced comparably to an illegal product. They will have to offer a user experience that competes with free. Read on.
Digital sheet music commerce must escape the doldrums
Gale-force winds are blowing through the music business, rearranging the livelihoods of composers, performers, publishers, labels and retailers. Take a look at recording, live performance or radio and you’ll see industry revenues in free-fall during the last decade. Many are quick to point the finger at technology and the ease of copying and stealing digital media.
In contrast to the recording industry, the sheet music business has remained surprisingly stable, but it shows little growth. What growth there is, is concentrated in the digital download sector — but even this is surprisingly sluggish when contrasted with the explosion in digital audio. I think the reason for both the overall market stasis and the slow digital growth is the same: the assets remain mostly physical, not digital. In fact, even the digital part of the business is paper-based in spirit.
Until the recent advent of tablets such as the iPad, there have been no suitable and cost-effective devices for displaying digital music while playing an instrument. Desktops and laptops are too physically clunky, and have the wrong form factor for the job. Thus, most digital purchases of sheet music to date are no more than a faster route to hard copy. Both consumers and publishers have been looking at the market this way. Without direct consumption of scores in digital form, and without publishers actively imagining and delivering new benefits unique to digital media, demand for digital assets is taking much longer to develop in the sheet music market. (Ironically, the low-touch experience of current digital sheet music may be lowering the rate of sheet music piracy — but only at the expense of crippling the market’s growth and evolution.)
Take a threatened sheet music industry, a market that doesn’t fully exploit digital assets, and season heavily with DRM concerns. What do you get? An abysmal e-commerce experience, from start to finish. Most digital sheet music sites require the user to download and install a special music viewer plugin or program, often with byzantine installation requirements. (An acquaintance recently told me it took her 20 minutes to make an online sheet music purchase and get past all the viewer installation problems. Her vow? “Never again.”) If one runs this gauntlet, one then finds one has purchased what amounts to a facsimile of a printed page. It’s not like an e-book. You can’t make the music fit your screen at a readable size. You can’t change the paper size, or orientation, or line breaks. You can’t make the notes bigger or smaller. You can’t change it in any way, although you could write on your printout with a pencil, as most musicians do in practice. At best, you may be able to select one of a family of rigid facsimiles, such as the same song in a variety of different pre-selected keys.
(The print-based value system inside music publishers looks askance at digital delivery in some ways. Flexibility of layout? Sorry, that might disrupt the expertly fine-tuned music layout in the publisher’s original printed copy. This is a bit like NYTimes.com saying that you can’t increase the font size in your browser, because only a master typesetter can decide where an article’s line breaks should go, or control the exact spacing between words.)
Does that seem bad enough? Wait, there’s more. You can only print your purchased copy of sheet music once or twice before your purchased print rights are exhausted. Sheet music publishers are obliged to compensate artists for every physical copy that winds up in the customer’s hands. Even if the music viewer let you edit or adapt the work you paid for — say, by adding dynamics or phrasing, tweaking the lyrics, changing the arrangement — you’d want to print it multiple times until you got it right. You’d probably even want to save the results on your computer. Whoops, you didn’t buy the rights to do that. (To be completely fair, the publisher probably doesn’t have the artist’s permission to sell multiple print rights to you.)
The copyright holder’s rights matter, of course, and I am not arguing for abrogating them. But the customer’s desires also matter, and the rigidity and antiquity of the publishing system is holding digital sheet music commerce back. The decimation of the recording industry offers a frightening lesson in the consequences of ignoring what consumers want. Stronger DRM schemes, stronger print restrictions and more punitive lawsuits will not teach the customer to want something else. If publishers and retailers do not begin to offer more appealing digital product, the water may overtop the dam and flow downhill.
Tablets are the New Music Delivery Devices
The iPad and its ilk will surely change the face of notated music. Finally we have a portable device that has the right form factor, the right connectivity and the right design for displaying a score in a performance situation, or for working on scores in a truly portable fashion. It’s enough of an household appliance to be comfortable, and enough of a computer to be capable.
So far there are few credible tools for score creation on these devices, and most delivery apps are focusing on reproducing the paper-based experience on the tablet screen, working with PDFs of scores. Sorry, that’s not going to work — it didn’t work on the desktop or laptop, and it definitely will not work on here. Users will, at a minimum, demand the same flexibility from music viewers that they demand from, say, an e-book reader. I believe they will go even further: they will want the ability to modify and adapt the music they have purchased, for their own purposes.
How about score creation? Sheet music creation on tablets is going to be at its most exciting and most useful when it’s part of a global, seamless cloud of content that spans the universe of devices on the web. Hmmm… sounds like what we do at Noteflight! Stay tuned.
HTML5 is Coming
You hear a lot these days about HTML5, the open-standards successor to Flash. (HTML5 also builds on top of HTML4, but did you ever hear anyone say “HTML4” out loud? Just wondering.)
Is Flash disappearing overnight? Noteflight, like many other leading-edge web apps, runs on Flash today. There is still no other viable choice if we want to give our users the audio experience of hearing music played in a consistent way within Noteflight. Flash has the rendering and audio muscle to deliver the features we need, along with strong cross-platform compatibility. The considerable resources of Adobe Systems stand behind it, and it’s installed on almost every device — except for some of the most desirable ones.
The promise of HTML5 is that it will deliver all the same benefits as Flash in a framework of pure open standards, available in any web browser. The benefit to the musician is that musical web apps like Noteflight will work on a very broad range of devices, both desktop and mobile, and many of the browser features we love and take for granted will “just work”: printing, zooming, searching for text, and more. (Imagine viewing a score in Noteflight with German lyrics, and hitting the “Translate to English” button in the browser!) Although Flash is very powerful, its integration with the browser environment is necessarily limited. An HTML5 music platform will be that much more seamless with respect to the rest of the web.
It sounds great, and it will be. But it’s going to take time for all the browser manufacturers and all the devices to bring this vision to life in a way that works reliably for everyone, everywhere. In reality HTML5 consists of a lot of different pieces that are being defined in fits and starts, and the audio part of it is still taking shape. The good news? As part of the W3C Audio Working Group, I am working on Noteflight’s behalf to help bring this aspect of HTML5 to fruition along with a bunch of amazing folks across the industry.
Beyond HTML5: Music Notation as a Standard Media Type
Music notation used to be something you looked at in a music notation program. That’s changed with the advent of web-based tools such as Noteflight. Notation is now embeddable everywhere: you can stick a score into any web page, as part of that page, and it remains a fully interactive score. It can even be controlled with JavaScript from other elements in the page.
As with video, this leads to a situation in which different kinds of media begin to entangle with each other and interbreed. Text and images and audio and video and music notation complement each other, and in thoughtfully created content they will add up to much more than the sum of the parts.
Eventually, we may find that music notation becomes like HTML (hypertext), JPEG (images), or MP3 (audio): a standard data type, with a standard encoding across the web. At this point, a bunch of new horizons will unfold. It will become easier than ever to share written music, because the only applications that will survive in this environment will be those that support the standard. Web browsers will most likely incorporate at least a music viewer as a standard component.
(Note to the curious: MusicXML is a de-facto standard data format for music notation interchange between notation programs. It is extremely useful and is an increasingly important part of the sheet music industry, yet some vendors provide incomplete or spotty support for it from their products, no doubt in an effort to “imprison” their users’ data. A data format only becomes a true standard when it becomes very, very bad business to ignore it. I believe we’ll get there, whether via MusicXML or another route.)