Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Enote (Bringing sheet music into the Digital Era via Artificial Intelligence)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2023-03-31
Digitization has completely revolutionized everyone’s lives. But when it comes to sheet music, there is only paper and PDF scans. Musicians (amateurs and professionals) are still stuck in the past. In other industries, digitization has been technically solved. Sheet music was printed with carved, metal plates. And scores exist in digital form only as pictures (PDFs). Imagine all your texts are not available in Microsoft Word, but only as a picture. That's why musicians print PDFs, wait for mail deliveries, visit libraries, make copies, bind printed paper sheets, cut & glue snippets together, and struggle with unreadable, small antiquated scores. The entire experience with sheet music is completely outdated and inconvenient. And on top of that, building a personal sheet music library costs a fortune. Many musicians are simply unable to afford to buy sheet music.
The Enote app for tablets, phones & laptops makes sheet music more accessible, affordable, convenient, and interactive. We are providing a product that can be described by the following terms:
1. Access & Affordability: Enote app offers free PDFs of most classical music scores, akin to Spotify Free. Scores are quality assured, enriched with metadata, and cataloged, surpassing current alternatives.
2. Convenience & Interaction: Enote employs pioneering AI, exclusively transcribing images (like PDF scans) into precise native digital formats (e.g. MusicXML). Comparable to Spotify Premium, this added value is available at 9.99€ / month.
3. Innovative Features: Enote's groundbreaking features, such as font and size adjustment, automated page turning, transposition, and rule-based annotations, push boundaries. These enhancements are currently unattainable elsewhere.
Future Expansion Potential:
With the support of the EIC, Enote has made remarkable progress in the modernization of written music. Our state-of-the-art AI processes have let us pioneer a new standard in digital sheet music that outperforms all alternatives through contextual functionality, while our globally available app gives classical musicians everywhere an unprecedented level of access to the sheet music they play.
Looking forward, we have ample opportunity to leverage these innovations in a much wider market with expansions that make the Enote app more accessible and useful for more musicians in more contexts. Doing so will let us capture a much larger portion of our Total Available Market, which in turn will give our smart, accessible digital score format the opportunity to become the standard that is used across the wider music industry.
Contemporary repertoire and music publishing are essential to this expansion. Outside of the classical world, most of the music that is consumed and played by musicians was written and published in the last 120 years, so is still subject to copyrights and royalty payments. In order to share the benefits of Enote to non-classical musicians, we need to offer this repertoire through our library. This means striking distribution deals with the publishers and artists who own these rights, introducing a revenue sharing subscription model that ensures they are paid fairly, and developing systems for importing, enhancing and presenting large volumes of new music in our library.
This publishing framework would let us extend our library from classically-focused to truly comprehensive, giving more musicians all the music they need through a central, affordable resource that pays their favorite artists fairly. In addition, a unified standard for digital sheet music consumption will give emerging composers and songwriters the tools to bypass traditional music publishing gatekeepers and develop their own audience and earnings independently through Enote, creating a more equitable publishing ecosystem with greater content choice for consumers.
Closer working ties with institutions like music universities and public libraries will also help solidify Enote’s position in the market, and enable collaborative sharing of historic resources and study documents, which will become more important as our B2B educational offering matures. In addition, an expansion onto new platforms outside of the Apple ecosystem will give more musicians that chance to access our library, and allow more institutions to fully embrace our solution with their preferred hardware.
Finally, further R&D in the field of automated music transcription will allow us to introduce some incredible new advances in both app functionality and sheet music creation. Among them would be our much-anticipated Automatic Page turning functionality, AI-powered score creation support that helps content owners transform existing recordings into scores that are ready to publish, and AI-assisted practice and feedback tools that help music students practice more effectively.
These future expansions are in line with the recommendations received by our project reviewers, and will be included in an upcoming second phase funding proposal to the EIC.
The Enote app for tablets, phones & laptops makes sheet music more accessible, affordable, convenient, and interactive. We are providing a product that can be described by the following terms:
1. Access & Affordability: Enote app offers free PDFs of most classical music scores, akin to Spotify Free. Scores are quality assured, enriched with metadata, and cataloged, surpassing current alternatives.
2. Convenience & Interaction: Enote employs pioneering AI, exclusively transcribing images (like PDF scans) into precise native digital formats (e.g. MusicXML). Comparable to Spotify Premium, this added value is available at 9.99€ / month.
3. Innovative Features: Enote's groundbreaking features, such as font and size adjustment, automated page turning, transposition, and rule-based annotations, push boundaries. These enhancements are currently unattainable elsewhere.
Future Expansion Potential:
With the support of the EIC, Enote has made remarkable progress in the modernization of written music. Our state-of-the-art AI processes have let us pioneer a new standard in digital sheet music that outperforms all alternatives through contextual functionality, while our globally available app gives classical musicians everywhere an unprecedented level of access to the sheet music they play.
Looking forward, we have ample opportunity to leverage these innovations in a much wider market with expansions that make the Enote app more accessible and useful for more musicians in more contexts. Doing so will let us capture a much larger portion of our Total Available Market, which in turn will give our smart, accessible digital score format the opportunity to become the standard that is used across the wider music industry.
Contemporary repertoire and music publishing are essential to this expansion. Outside of the classical world, most of the music that is consumed and played by musicians was written and published in the last 120 years, so is still subject to copyrights and royalty payments. In order to share the benefits of Enote to non-classical musicians, we need to offer this repertoire through our library. This means striking distribution deals with the publishers and artists who own these rights, introducing a revenue sharing subscription model that ensures they are paid fairly, and developing systems for importing, enhancing and presenting large volumes of new music in our library.
This publishing framework would let us extend our library from classically-focused to truly comprehensive, giving more musicians all the music they need through a central, affordable resource that pays their favorite artists fairly. In addition, a unified standard for digital sheet music consumption will give emerging composers and songwriters the tools to bypass traditional music publishing gatekeepers and develop their own audience and earnings independently through Enote, creating a more equitable publishing ecosystem with greater content choice for consumers.
Closer working ties with institutions like music universities and public libraries will also help solidify Enote’s position in the market, and enable collaborative sharing of historic resources and study documents, which will become more important as our B2B educational offering matures. In addition, an expansion onto new platforms outside of the Apple ecosystem will give more musicians that chance to access our library, and allow more institutions to fully embrace our solution with their preferred hardware.
Finally, further R&D in the field of automated music transcription will allow us to introduce some incredible new advances in both app functionality and sheet music creation. Among them would be our much-anticipated Automatic Page turning functionality, AI-powered score creation support that helps content owners transform existing recordings into scores that are ready to publish, and AI-assisted practice and feedback tools that help music students practice more effectively.
These future expansions are in line with the recommendations received by our project reviewers, and will be included in an upcoming second phase funding proposal to the EIC.
The activities we conducted so far were aimed to help us achieve technology readiness level 7. Most of the effort has been done with regard to product development. The list of accomplishments looks as follows:
1. Development of advanced OMR models
2. Printed Editions
3. Material curation environment
4. Highly scalable OMR pipeline. OMR pipeline automation
5. RnD: Score following system development
6. RnD: music synthesis and playback solution development
7. Smart annotation tools development
8. RnD activities of metadata search engine
1. Development of advanced OMR models
2. Printed Editions
3. Material curation environment
4. Highly scalable OMR pipeline. OMR pipeline automation
5. RnD: Score following system development
6. RnD: music synthesis and playback solution development
7. Smart annotation tools development
8. RnD activities of metadata search engine
This team has undertaken groundbreaking research in the field of Optical Music Recognition inside the EU as part of our product development, exceeding previous best publicly-known levels of object detection, classification, and semantic segmentation in the field of optical music recognition. This research has let us create a product that - for the first time - gives musicians tools that substantially outperform the capabilities of paper sheet music. This gives them a compelling reason to switch to digital scores and reduce the paper and transport consumption that has traditionally been a byproduct of their music creation. This shift is already happening and will continue as our library offers a more comprehensive selection of music as our features develop even further toward our long-term vision.