Managing sweet sounds

Science News, Sept 25, 1999 by I.P.

Staging an opera or performing a symphony that demands a full orchestra is a complicated business. Musical scores can run to hundreds of pages, distributed among dozens of performers. During rehearsals, a conductor may rearrange or delete sections of music and change which instruments play which parts. Individual musicians may scribble reminders on their pages to indicate how loudly or softly to play certain passages.

Making and tracking such modifications to the score can add up to a massive information-management headache. Now, software engineers have climbed onto the podium. Paolo Nesi and his coworkers at the University of Florence have developed a computer-based system for creating, updating, and storing annotated scores. The researchers describe their project in the September COMPUTER.

In the Music Object-Oriented Distributed System (MOODS), a network of electronic lecterns replaces an orchestra's traditional printed music scores and metal stands. Musicians and the conductor read from screens that scroll the music in time with the performance, eliminating the shuffling of pages. In addition, each musician's lectern allows editing of an individual part, and the conductor's lectern allows modifications of the main score. An archivist's workstation monitors major changes, distributing updated music to all the lecterns.

During rehearsals, "several musicians may work simultaneously on the same music score, on the same part, and on the same measure, changing and adding music notation symbols and sharing the results of the manipulation in real time with the other musicians," the researchers note.

Nesi and his colleagues demonstrated their prototype system at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy, in a concert featuring nine musicians performing music by Mozart, Vivaldi, and Verdi. Developed further, this technology could prove immensely useful for musicians, conductors, and even music publishers, who could distribute customized electronic versions of specific performances, Nesi remarks.