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Sage
Join Date: Jun 2003
Posts: 739
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Electronic Music Stand
I've got this really cool idea:
Electronic Music Stand
I want someone to invent an Electronic Music Stand. With flat-panel monitors coming down in price and looking better all the time, and with the kind of technology that's available in devices like Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs, someone could create a really cool Electronic Music Stand for orchestras and other ensembles. Here's how it would work:
It would look pretty much like a regular music stand, except the easel part would be a large flat-panel monitor, large enough to show 2 or 3 pages of sheet music. It would have a lip in front for holding paper sheet music, as well as a pocket in back for storing paper sheet music out of the way but close at hand.
It would have a touch-sensitive screen and 2 styli, one stored on the left edge and one on the right, so that both players using the stand could make notations at will.
It would have buttons at the base of the stand so page-turns could be made by tapping the button with your feet.
This would be such a boon to players! It would put an end to the page-turn scramble. No more pausing to deal with ill-timed page turns; you could just tap a button with your foot.
It would also be great for making annotations. Orchestra musicians are constantly marking up their sheet music with tempo markings, bowings, fingerings, circles, dynamic markings, drawings of little eyeglasses (meaning LOOK at the conductor), sharps and flats, etc. Currently all those notations have to be made in pencil, which has its limitations. "Graphite" isn't exactly the easiest color to see, but it's the only option, as all annotations have to be erasable. And after a while your sheet music gets filled with ghostly palimpsests from orchestras past.
But what if you could mark up your sheet music in blue or green or red electronic ink? And have your annotations disappear without a trace when it's time to pass the music on to the next person?
Better yet, you could have each person using a stand have their own color ink. Sometimes two people prefer different fingerings for the same passage.
Another problem this could solve, in string sections, is coordinating bowings. What if the section leader could mark all the bowings in a piece and sync it up to the other stands in her section? Everyone would automatically have the correct bowings!
It would be neat, also, to give the conductor control over all the stands in the orchestra, so that when the conductor says "start at 8 measures before letter M," all the stands would turn to the correct page and highlight the start of the passage. This would save an unbelievable amount of time and confusion.
And then, of course, there's the wonderful backlight. Less-than-ideal lighting conditions are a constant struggle for players. Think about what this could mean for jazz musicians in a smoky bar, or a pit orchestra in a darkened pit. No more need for clip-on stand lights. (Also, in outdoor settings, you wouldn't have to worry about your sheet music blowing away!)
This could really streamline ordering and returning of rental music. Many orchestras, instead of buying sheet music, rent it from music rental houses. Currently this involves time delay, the costs of shipping it around, as well as the hassle of making sure to gather up all the parts after a concert. Electronic sheet music, however, could be downloaded directly off the Internet, in exactly the quantities needed, and be coded to expire the day after the concert (similar to the process used by the Libwise lending library in lending out eBooks.)
Such a system would of course have its limitations. The most obvious one is price. Orchestras, unfortunately, do not have a lot of money to throw around. (Maybe Bill Gates could get the ball rolling by donating several sets of eStands to various school orchestras?) The next one is powering the devices. Cords snaking all over the place would be a safety hazard, so they'd have to have batteries. In a large rehearsal space with many stands, the best option would probably be to have a huge battery charger that can accomodate dozens of batteries. Everyone would bring their batteries over to the charger at the end of rehearsal.
Another drawback is that the stands would either have to be highly portable (which would add to the cost; high-quality portable music stands already don't come cheap), or there would have to be a set of stands at the rehearsal space, plus each person would have their own stand at home. The music could be transferred from one locale to another either by Internet or using a memory card.
The stands could have other features as well, like a built-in metronome, built-in tuner, or a built-in music player (ideally, this would involve software that would, say, play a symphony while turning the pages in time with the music, so that one could listen and follow along in one's part at the same time.) You could also incorporate music learning or composition software. The touch-sensitive screen could allow composers to write directly on the "sheets," and then handwriting-recognition software could convert it to standardized forms. It could even separate out a score into parts!
So what do you guys think of this idea? And who can I get to invent one of these?
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