It’s time to continue this multi-part rumination on where digital music notation stands today. But first, a quick glance back over the shoulder at last week’s post.

I was fascinated by some of the reactions to Part 1, A Brief Manifesto. My intention was to offer a sort of “love note” to music notation, without hating on anything in particular (or, indeed, anything at all). To my surprise, some seemed to read the piece as a sort of rejection of digital production tools, or audio media, or electronica, or non-standard notational systems. I was even labeled a Luddite, which would seem to require me to take up a sledgehammer and start methodically smashing samplers and synthesizers (and presumably switch off those soul-sucking web servers that run Noteflight). Altogether too much work, and in any case my heart would not be in it: I’m a big fan of all these things. I’m an inclusionist, not an exclusionist. I just want to call attention to what notation uniquely brings to our musical experience — and by notation, I mean any form of musical notation at all, from a grand staff to George Crumb to Japanese gagaku.

Now on to Part 2.

Something I don’t like about written music is the process of writing it on paper by hand, which I find laborious in the extreme. Thank goodness for music software.

Music notation software was attempted at first by only a few trailbreaking pioneers (who deserve their own post) in the late 60s and 1970s. They found out that it presented an incredibly hard set of problems. Commercially available software notation tools finally came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s and, like all real-world solutions, addressed only a subset of the problems uncovered by the trailblazers.

People who build software are always working from some imagined vision of what other people will do with it. The resulting programs have strengths and weaknesses which are deeply entangled with this vision, and that vision is usually a creature of its times. It’s impossible to step outside of your present time and realize what you are taking for granted. Accordingly the starting point for digital music notation was very much an 80s/90s vision of “office productivity software”: an expert user privately communes with a computer over the course of hours, days or weeks and carefully crafts an end-product: a digital document, saved as a file on a hard disk. This document can then be shared with others in its final form through the technological magic of… printing.

This vision was nothing to sneer at. The advent of personal computers, personal high-resolution printers, and personal storage media was amazing and revolutionary. But despite the great leap forward in notation software, the implied goal remained one of easing music’s journey to the printed page, rather than the journey from one human mind to another. Yes, you could give someone a digital score file — if they owned the same software, in a compatible version, and you could physically get the file to them in a pre-Internet era. The only true medium of exchange remained the physical paper on which the score was printed (or paper-equivalent formats like PDF). Correspondingly, notation software put a premium on making the printout look good and on giving the user a lot of fine control over the printed rendering.

So the software of that time was concerned with making something. In 2011, I look at our culture and I see a different priority: sharing something. In the case of notation, this takes us right back to its origins: notation as a web of musical ideas, connecting musicians together.

Our modern culture is just as interested in the process of creation as the end product. We may be more likely to share streams of snippets about what we are doing, than to labor over a long autobiography. We’re more likely to post on Facebook than keep diaries or craft eloquent letters. Set aside notation for a moment; look at how this change has affected writing, recorded music, filmmaking, photography. The web has unleashed a perpetual, public flood of creativity in the form of blogs, posts, videos, tweets, shared media of all sorts. It’s mostly small-to-medium size works, not enormous works — but, big or small, it’s bringing pleasure to a lot of folks. We like the new ease and spontaneity of doing and making things for each other. We like the ease of sharing them.

I doubt that this is a deep change in human behavior. I suspect it’s simply become easier to do something we’ve always liked doing as a species. A great deal of humans’ creative output has always consisted of casually sharing small-to-medium achievements with each other, while magnum opuses are relatively rare. What’s new is that our tools and our technologies have finally accommodated this fact: people like to make a lot of stuff without a lot of fuss and share it with others. Not all that stuff is complicated, and not all of it is carefully assembled. The process of making it and sharing it is fun and is an end in itself.

In the cloistered notation software world, though, the song has remained the same until recently. Notation software stayed in the world of Microsoft Word, taking no notice of phenomena like Google Docs, blogs, social media, cloud computing. Finale and Sibelius were locked in a desktop struggle to the death — who could best serve the expert user, at several hundred dollars a pop? Ever more complex features multiplied, in increasingly cluttered user interfaces. The whole concept was still geared to the personal hard drive and the personal printer, not to the Internet.

In the meantime, times had changed. People wanted — no, expected — to have fun using software! They expected to share the results of having that fun with others, a fun thing in itself.

Notation software was ignoring…

• The sketch of a melody that comes out of nowhere and begs to be captured quickly.
• The desire to instantly share that melody with a friend.
• The desire to find out what one’s friends think of one’s melody, and to make new friends in the process.
• The pleasure of exploring a creative medium without reading a manual or taking a training class.
• The music student working on a laptop in a coffee shop, instead of a workstation in a school music lab.
• The busy musician at a gig, making a chart on the spot for another player to read.
• The joyous creativity of a world that loves to recycle and adapt its favorite musical ideas.

So what’s happening, and what’s next? I’ll post my thoughts of that in Part 3, next week. Of course, Noteflight is part of this picture in its reimagining of notation for our connected era, but there are many other exciting developments taking place simultaneously. The combination of all of them is going to be very heady indeed.

We’re excited to announce that Noteflight CEO Joe Berkovitz will be speaking at the 8th SF MusicTech Summit in San Francisco (www.sfmusictech.com). For the first time, SF MusicTech will feature a panel discussion on digital music notation. We’re very pleased to have been invited to join this panel, and our co-panelists are a truly stellar group:

• Joe Burzinski, Hal Leonard Corporation, VP of Digital Enterprise
  Solutions
• Michael Good, CEO of Recordare Software and creator of the MusicXML standard
• Peter Maund, Legato Media, VP of Business Development
• Beth Sorensen, MakeMusic, Inc., VP of Engineering

Brian and Shoshana Zisk produce this conference, and it’s a first-class event featuring many other quality panels and presentations on music and technology. Hope you can make it!

At Noteflight, I am lucky to watch the music world change and evolve every day. New information streams in from our team members, our friends, our users and our business partners. The changes in the way people are creating art, building technology and doing business are a steady source of wonder and, sometimes, disruption or even confusion.

In the middle of all this uncertainty, one thing is certain: it is an extraordinarily exciting time to be alive as a musician and a technologist. We’ve been lucky to launch our business at a moment when new possibilities are in flux, and old assumptions are being shattered. As a result, Noteflight is playing an active role in the rearrangement of the music world that is taking place.

I feel moved to take a moment, hit the pause button and reflect. I want to try and set down some observations today on the value of notation and on what’s been happening in the area of digital music notation. We’ll serialize these in the coming weeks.

Let me begin with a quick riff on why I love written music, and think it’s both important and fun.

Western notation began as a way to help people remember music. Before notation, people listened to music, memorized it, and played what they remembered hearing, adding their own improvisation and expression. After notation, they did the same thing but with a new ingredient: performers now had access to a far greater range of music to play, a range that was not limited to what one could hear in person or memorize by rote.

Notation also meant that composers creating music were no longer limited to playing it themselves, or working with the performers that they could meet in person. Written music became a channel, a vehicle for creativity in itself. It became a way to connect musicians to each other, musicians who could be geographically distant. As music notation evolved to become more exact and expressive, composers were able to capture more and more complex musical ideas, which built on each other. Notation was helping to form a musical web of composers and performers, feeding off of each other’s ideas and techniques. Noteflight, for its part, is taking this web of musical ideas and situating it within the modern-day Web.

One of the things that emerged from these new relationships between composers and performers was the Western musical canon of masterworks. Given the genius and the cultural importance of these works, it’s tempting to sometimes think of the purpose of notation as a kind of low-tech recording medium, a way for a master composer to specify every detail of a performance before it even happens. That’s partly true, and partly false. Paradoxically, notation remains the loosest, freest, most improvisation-friendly form in which music can be captured.

I am personally in love with the looseness and freedom that notation allows. Even our most complex masterworks contain vital room for the performer to move: a written piece can be played and interpreted in an infinity of ways. If it’s a classical piece, the tempo, dynamics, phrasing and many other aspects are fair game for the performer. If it’s a jazz, rock or folk piece, the choice of notes is left open too. Notation isn’t really music: it’s a set of ideas that can be spun out into infinite musical possibilities. Possibilities are really cool.

By comparison, audio is a frozen, static record of something that was played once. You can remix it, resample it and apply effects to it, but its musical DNA is a done deal. An audio recording contains the same ideas that could be written down in notation, but the recording is already telling you, “this is how it sounds.” In contrast, a score asks a question: “how could this sound?”

Next week: continuing with Part 2: “That 80s Software”.