ProjectProposal-Julius Cheng
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Overview
Pen and paper is still an invaluable medium for music composition. The navigability, portability, manipulability, and ease of use of paper are hard to beat with any digital technology available today. Yet computers are not without their own unique contributions to the creative endeavors of musicians. The Anoto digital pen can combine all the benefits writing on paper provides with the powerful music editing software available on the market today.
The Target Group
Composers are a very diverse group of people. Some make a living out of it, and to some it is a hobby. Some write complex orchestral works and some others write solo pieces. Some use only paper to write compositions on, some use digital sheet music or MIDI editing software, and many use both. But any composer of any kind of music who uses paper can stand to benefit from digital editing, and users of primarily digital tools is missing out on the freedom of working on paper. Almost any music composer can be more productive by combining the best of paper and computers software.
Problem Description
Many composers choose pen and paper over computer because paper can be carried anywhere and written upon instantly. Inspiration often does not wait for a computer to be accessed and turned on and software to load. Furthermore, the use of paper affords alternating between writing music and playing a musical instrument easily, while computers are immobile or unwieldy, and often require two hands to use, which makes editing sheet music and switching to playing an instrument difficult. Paper, however, can be messy; erasing and crossing out music leaves a mess. It is very difficult to edit existing passages. The problem can be summed up thusly: composing on paper is slow and hard, composing on a computer is not conducive to the creative process, and as of yet there is no simple way to interface the two mediums.
Problem context and forces
Music composers can vary tremendously in their creative habits such that it is difficult to assess all possible situations but it might help to imagine a few cases where paper is the preferred medium by all accounts:
•A Berkeley music student is on the BART with only a notebook and pen when he finally thinks of a way to end a song he has been writing on his computer.
•A professional composer is working at a piano. He can place a pad of paper on the piano’s sheet music holder so that his work is directly in front of him.
•An aging conductor is arranging an orchestral work and has never used music editing software before.
These are three examples of why paper is still popular for composing. In this first, computers are simply unwieldy, and unlikely to be carried everywhere one goes, while ideas can materialize any time. The second shows that paper allows simultaneous composing and instrument playing, and the final example shows that paper is simply what many are accustomed to. In all cases, though, their work could surely benefit from a direct interface between work on paper to the computer. The student can upload his writing directly to the file his song is written in. The professional can clean up his work and work on it further by editing on the computer. The conductor can have all of the scribbles and cross-outs on his massive piece automatically cleaned up, and printed out in a clean, computer-generated format. Also, software can play multi-channel music, so the conductor can hear his work played back to him, albeit in a way incomparable to live musicians.
Solution
The proposed solution to the problem is a system using the Anoto digital pen technology. A musical composition on this system can be edited digitally or on paper, whichever the user prefers at any given time. A work on Anoto dotted paper printed with a musical staff can be read by the system’s software and translated into an editable format on the computer, either MIDI or other sheet music editing software. The reader software can understand the musical notation (like handwriting recognition, but much easier to implement given the small character base) and delete X-outs that indicate a marking that should be erased. Once uploaded, other editing software can be used to alter this file however the user pleases, and it can be printed out. Once printed, the user can X-out notes or other markings on the page to indicate deletion on the next upload, as well as add new passages at the end of the composition. The printout can be edited until the user decides to upload again, and so on until the work is finished.
The life cycle of a musical composition using this system can be viewed below:
At this time, no company appears to be working on anything similar. Writing on sheet music with the Anoto pen was very briefly mentioned as a possible idea in Wired.com’s 2001 article about Anoto technology.
