Beatik- Collaborative Digital Scores Platform for Classical Music

Project Information

BEATIK

Grant agreement ID: 822897

DOI

10.3030/822897

Project closed

EC signature date 25 July 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 March 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 1 066 417,50

EU contribution

€ 746 492,25

Coordinated by

REVINCLASSIC SOCIEDAD LIMITADA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BEATIK (Beatik- Collaborative Digital Scores Platform for Classical Music)

Reporting period: 2019-06-01 to 2020-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Sheet music publishers have, for years, operated a business whose added value is principally printing and selling paper; 95% of classic music being out of copyright and free to be distributed by anyone.
BEATIK is a 100% paperless solution for the use and distribution of music scores. Beyond simply representing the written music on a screen, the BEATIK app features our unmatched score-following and auto-scroll technology and includes a host of other innovative tools for interactions between musicians working together in large groups. BEATIK will provide an integrated platform and eco-system to help all musicians and the institutions they belong to, such as orchestras, conservatoires and music schools, from performance preparation to sharing annotations and score distribution. This will greatly reduce the quantity of paper used in distributing sheet music, its storage and transportation, costing average €150k/institution/year. BEATIK will create savings for music organisations, providing a tool to supersede paper scores and the limited digital scores solutions currently on the market. We forecast €2.94M sales in three years after this Phase 2 project completion, with annual profit of €1.58M (EBITDA) after €1.07 million total investment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main objective of this project is to improve BEATIK from an app with limited features directed to individual musicians, to a solution of app+platform with new and important functionalities that fully cover rehearsals and performances of classical music, as well as the distribution and score management needs of music organisations.
During this project, the BEATIK app has been improved with the following new features:
• iOS and Android porting. The app is now working also on Android platform from 7.0 version.
• Score catalog, including copyright free PDF’s. 124,460 works with more than 400,000 PDF’s scores are now stored in the BEATIK library, Smart scores from BEATIK catalog (over 2,000, that can be converted from: XML files, Lylipond files, from PDF+audio files) and Smart scores from publishers. We have made a commercial effort to reach agreements with some publishers to add their digitalized sheet music in our library.
• The Cloud Platform involves web access for user login/sign up and management, a front-end to include scores in BEATIK library and a robust search engine.
• Android and iOS users can now create annotation layers as well as displaying annotations of other users of their musucians group. BEATIK’s in-house Score Viewing Program is now developed for rendering the digital paper sheets on screen in the standard human-readable format. Using PDF music sheets allow us to increase drastically the number of available scores in our library.
• BEATIK includes the possibility of performing audio following. Our new technology is able to follow an interpretation and compare it with previous records of the same work.


Objectives listed on the proposal and our achievements:

• Technical achievements:
Flexible Database (orchestras, music shools and ensembles) for users, managing groups, interconnections and hierarchy and positions within groups. Web interface to allow bulk management of user groups/roles and distribution of scores.
Content Database to make scores available for download through the app (124,460 PDF works and 990 Smart Scores works). BEATIK library is also ready for including publisher digital scores and for importing user scores. BEATIK is now ready for training the score from user with just a PDF and an audio recording.
All Smart Scores are stored in encrypted .BTK format in order to assure data security.
Successful porting from iOS to Android, using High Performance Computing techniques and parallelism in order to use all the computing resources.
BEATIK app is now ready to provide an audio recording of the interpretation and convert different score formats (POF, Lilypond) into Smart Scores. We have implemented a process for parsing XML files and converting them into Smart scores (ready for automatic page turning).
Annotations on scores are displayed in Viewer and can be instantly included, removed and shared among the musical group in real-time. Sharing annotations is the optimum way to completely remove paper usage and avoid scores re-printing.
Synthesizer that reproduces the piece from the XML file at a chosen speed with metronome functionality.

• Commercial & financial activities:
27-Feb-2019: first BEATIK concert as kick-off of our crowdfunding campaign.
The composer Juan Antonio Simarro has tried BEATIK with a composition designed for allowing the pianists showing their own performing expression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtOTPRs1acg.
15-Oct-2019: second BEATIK concert as kick-off of BEATIK Soloist.
The international violinist Leticia Moreno has tried out BEATIK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTOulJrSgsc.
7/14-Mar-2020: BEATIK festival (Altea, Alicante, Spain), including an orchestra concert (Orquesta Sinfónica de la Región de Murcia), an ensemble concert (La Tempestad) and some chamber concerts with academy students and professors.
Our social network campaigns have been impressed 2,817,088 times, with over 4,000 Facebook followers, 132,000 Google searches and more than 21,000 open mails.
1-Jul-2019: First commercial version market launch: BEATIK Soloist. The business model of BEATIK soloist is a free installation and a 40 €/yr subscription to access the score following services.
1-Apr-2020: Second commercial version market launch: BEATIK Groups. The business model of BEATIK groups is a free installation and a paid subscription to access to the web interface management for groups and the score following services. The initial subscription price is 500 €/yr (ensemble), 5,000 €/yr (music school) and 12,000 €/yr (orchestra).
For all cases, the access to copyrighted sheet music from publishers is under payment.
BEATIK has been installed 1,640 times from the AppStore and 475 times from Google Play.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

BEATIK completely replaces printed music scores. BEATIK distributes music scores with a fully digital business model. This new business model has cost-saving potential for musicians, managers and also music publishers.
Compared to competitors, BEATIK has the following advantages:
• Best-in-class Score Following algorithm providing active listening of all instruments of an orchestra or group of musicians.
• Annotations management. The only in-real-time score annotations exchange that facilitates collaborative work among musicians.
• All-in-one management tool for music institutions for effective administration of musical information during preparation and performances of musical pieces.
• BEATIK displays scores of PDF format, but is able to convert digital scores in XML and Lilypond formats to be compatible as Smart Scores. Every PDF can be converted into Smart Score to enjoy score following just with a recording of the interpretation.
To sum up, BEATIK wants the fully digitalization of the musician work with sheet music. Different factors have been overcome: (1) lack of digital scores, (2) restrictions for the distribution of digital scores, (3) difficult use and annotations of digital scores, (4) get used to turning pages in digital scores. All these problems are solved with the final version of BEATIK with the following tools: (1) BEATIK library, (2) BEATIK Web Interface Management, (3) Annotations editing and sharing in BEATIK, (4) Score and audio following.

Image 1 from BEATIK team.

Image from promotional concert held in Madrid the 27th of February 2019.

BEATIK members at Musikmesse Trade Fair.

Image from promotional concert held in Madrid the 15th of October 2019.

Image from the BEATIK soloist campaign in social networks.

Image 1 from the rehearsal with the ORCAM orchestra.

Image 2 from BEATIK team.

Image 2 from the rehearsal with the ORCAM orchestra.

Image 3 from BEATIK team.