Music alphabet for low-resolution touch displays Ondej Poláek Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague Karlovo námstí 13, 12135 Praha 2, Czech Republic polacond@fel.cvut.cz Adam J. Sporka University of Trento Via alla Cascata 56/C, 38100 Trento, Italy adam@sporka.eu Pavel Slavík Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague Karlovo námstí 13, 12135 Praha 2, Czech Republic slavik@fel.cvut.cz ABSTRACT In this paper we present a novel approach to writing music on handheld pen-based devices which has been developed during the implementation of MusicMan, our pen-based music score editor. A new alphabet of music symbols has been designed especially for use on devices with small screens by musicians skilled in writing the music by hand. Our alphabet is based on simplification of the common Western music notation symbols, making them easier to write on PDA while retaining their overall feel. A user study described in this paper revealed that the alphabet is significantly faster, easier-to-use and more accepted by the first- time users of PDA than the state-of-art method for pen-based writing of music. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Ergonomics, Input devices and strategies – touchscreen, mobile device. H.5.5 [Sound and Music Computing]: Methodologies and techniques General Terms Design, Languages Keywords Music Score Editor; Pen-Based Interfaces; Handwritting; Comparative Study 1. INTRODUCTION Composing music is a process of transforming music invention into a musical piece. As with any other creative process, the music invention arrives very often while the composer is focusing on some other activity but it is vital that the composer records this invention as it may be easily forgotten. Different composers adopt different strategies to prevent this. For example, a Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854 – 1928) was often seen to write pieces of music on the wristbands of his shirt. Other composers would keep a music notebook or a voice recorder with them at all times. Figure 1. The MusicMan application. a) MusicMan Alphabet b) Recognized and typeset notes Nowadays many music composers use personal computers for writing, arranging and storing their music scores. While the current music authoring and arrangement tools, such as Finale or Sibelius 1 , offer ample range of music editing functions, there is usually a significant effort needed to access these tools, such as turning on the PC etc. This paper presents our pen-based music editor MusicMan, input music alphabet and a user study we have performed. Our aim was to develop a solution that would provide the main features of the computer music software (interactive playback, music score data transfers) while keeping the preparedness of the music notebook. The result of this effort is a PDA-based application MusicMan where the composer uses an alphabet of music symbols (MusicMan Alphabet) which is based on the contemporary Western music notation and has been designed with respect to the limited screen resolution and computing resources of PDA. The goal of MusicMan (see Figure 1) is to provide a portable solution for writing down music ideas and parts of future compositions, including polyphonic motives and harmonic structures. The application is intended for recording an instant idea which can be subsequently expanded in composer’s favorite music editing tool. 2. RELATED WORK There are numerous methods to write and process the sheet music on the PC: WIMP 2 based editors (such as already mentioned 1 http://www.sibelius.com, http://www.finalemusic.com 2 Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer