MuseScore - Open source innovation in music | Drupal & UX

-- 10:46

There is a livestream on twitter, Drupal hangout on google, Drupal Association are recording this to YouTube channel, and we are live-blogging the session.

-- 10:47

The project started as a Kickstarter with various open tools and services in order to raise money to produce and record Bach’s Goldberg Variations, then gave it back to the community by releasing it with a Creative Commons license, enabling anyone to use it as they wish.

-- 10:49

Various slides are being shown that are demonstrations of how the iPhone and iPad apps that have been used. This was facilitated by a German Publisher that picked up on the project.

-- 10:51

Many signs of success of the project such as 16 recordings from the project being posted on the Wikipedia page for Goldberg Variations.

Robert: Only a few days after releasing the project under a CC license it became increasingly clear that there were many ways that this would positively affect many peoples lives in undiscovered ways.

-- 10:55

-- 10:56

Robert moves on to talking about MuseScore. The mission here is to democratize music. The industry does not meet everyone’s needs, as the primary focus of the publishers is to provide scores for bestsellers, only available for the most popular instruments.

-- 10:58

How does Drupal allow musical scores to be treated as content?

Groupware collaboration, editing, annotation, playback and embedding on third party sites.

There is no standardized format online for search engines to find or understand scores. MuseScore is helping to change this.

-- 11:00

Robert: Music is a text-based language that has been around for hundreds of years and should be part of HTML5. We want this to happen!

-- 11:01

Music should be content. This is a fundamental goal of the Open Goldberg Variations.

-- 11:02

Sheet music search results and interface in Drupal site.

MuseScore interface for collaboratively editing a score online.

-- 11:04

Drupal facilitates a subscription model to generate revenue which helps to protect copyright and privacy. This is done through a turn-key subscription model (UberCart on D6).

-- 11:05

Drupal technology has been used on MuseScore to facilitate a multilingual site with over 30 languages. There is also an open-community subdomain to enable the community to collaborate in translating to additional languages. (See link at the end of this post).

-- 11:06

Scores that translate, scores that synchronise with YouTube videos!

For example, a video of your daughter playing Mozart’s moonlight sonata can be played as musescore highlights through the score in the correct place, no matter what speed the piece is played.

-- 11:09

MuseScore is being used to connect communities, services and technologies. It is helping to blur and remove the boundaries between radio, internet, mobile, video, and eradicating language divides through music.

-- 11:12

Only recently did Robert become aware These scores are the only inroad to this music for the majority of visually-impaired and blind people.

-- 11:15