LiveScores: bridging the gap between paper and digital
Music is an art that requires training and talent, but above all time and patience. For hundreds of years, few people have been able to understand it and put it into practice.
The number of people who could (and can today) "hear" music simply by looking at the notes is even smaller. Huge barriers make it very difficult to actively engage with and enjoy music.
Open the score of a piece you've never heard before - a song, a sonata, a symphony. Look at the hundreds and thousands of notes. Who wouldn't dream of a magic wand to make it sing, to bring it to life?
Newzik now offers this bridge between two worlds: that of paper scores and that of digital scores, with our new AI-based optical music recognition technology, Maestria.
Take a picture of your score, press "Play" and listen to the music. Enjoy a lively, dynamic partner instead of dry ink on paper.
It sounds quite technical, and in fact it is.
Take a photo of your score, press play and listen to the music.
Transpose it, play it faster or slower, deactivate your recording and play only with the accompaniment, share it in real time with colleagues and friends working on the same piece, wherever they are, enrich it with annotations, audio and video files.
Enjoy a lively, dynamic partner instead of dry, dusty notes on your score sheet.
What do we do? A powerful AI-driven engine. The most advanced available, it analyzes the image of your score and transforms it into a digital format with almost 100% reliability.
We open up this new world of scores in Newzik, fully adapted to your needs, fully interactive, fully collaborative. All while protecting your copy, performance and exploitation rights.
And it's not just the music that's transformed, but all the metadata too. The list is long: composer, title, tempi, dynamic indications, fingerings, bows, breathing marks, the whole scale of information hitherto petrified into black dots of ink on paper, is brought to life. Dancing polka dots!
"Music education without digital tools has become unimaginable, and Newzik, as a fully collaborative and versatile tool, will become even more useful with Maestria, this fascinating new OMR engine."
David Mash, Berklee College of Music, Boston
The interpretation and study of music involve a good deal of seriousness: stability of impression, familiarity with a motif, an image of the music, are important factors for musicians. This is often an intimate relationship, and scores represent the precious craft of generations of engravers, in many cases hundreds of years old.
At Newzik, we marry the best of both worlds in what we call LiveScore: a smart, interactive format that lets you keep your favorite editions (like Urtext editions) while offering the unique benefits of a dynamic digital sheet music .
Press play and listen to the music, while continuing to play it from your composition, enjoying the dynamics of a digital format without having to give up your sheet music. This applies to jazz standards such as Beethoven 9 or an exciting new piece of contemporary music.
"Our digital score innovation was immediately adopted by many colleagues in the technical departments of the Vienna State Opera. The stage managers, for example, will no longer be able to do without it. We also chose Newzik because access to the latest editions of all important works direct from the publishers is essential to our work as leading opera houses. Our homes are always full of scores. Our libraries need this new bridge between paper and digital."
Dominique Meyer, Sovrintendente La Scala, Milan
We believe that the score you need is not a new digital edition, but rather the one you're used to working on, rehearsing, playing and performing. That's why we cooperate closely with publishers, whose enormous contribution to the music ecosystem we fully recognize over the past 300 years, up to the present day, and for years to come. We are not digital publishers: we guarantee responsible use of the game-changing tool we put in your hands.
"Newzik has been a game-changer for us since we first met and created UEnow. This last, incredibly difficult year of 2020 has clearly shown everyone in the music business just how indispensable new technologies are at every level. Maestria, Newzik's OMR engine and LiveScores will once again change the game, and we're delighted to be shaping it together."
Astrid Koblanck, CEO Universal Edition, Vienna
Newzik fully integrates this revolutionary OMR engine and the ease of use of LiveScores with a secure distribution channel for individual musicians and institutional users such as ensembles, orchestras or opera houses. This makes our tools particularly powerful for composing and arranging: we're opening up a new world of music distribution and promotion, bridging the gap between analog and digital.
At Newzik, we believe in freedom of choice instead of compartmentalizing content into exclusive catalogs, and in making the most advanced tools available openly instead of hiding them in the background. We invite all players in the music world - professional musicians, amateurs, teachers and students, groups and ensembles of all kinds, composers, publishers - to enjoy the benefits of this revolutionary leap from a cumbersome 18th-century paper past to a lively, collaborative future.
"For a long time, I've been working on integrating digital technologies into music creation and teaching. This year 2020, with all its restrictions, has brought a totally new dimension to distance learning, with advantages that are here to stay. Teaching music without digital devices has become unimaginable, and Newzik, as a fully collaborative and versatile tool, will become even more useful with Maestria, this fascinating new OMR engine."
David Mash, Senior Vice President for Innovation, Strategy and Technology at Berklee College of Music, Boston
