Notes from Miss Em: Techno Tuesday – Brief Review of StaffPad

I thought I’d begin a series of Techno Tuesday Blogs sharing new technology finds which may be of use in the classroom. The first cab off the rank is an extremely exciting new release - StaffPad available from the Windows Store for $70. Composer, Music Engraver and Music Consultant Philip Rothman describes this product as “quite simply, the most fun, innovative, and ground-breaking music notation software available today” and I have to agree!

As avid users of Finale and Sibelius my husband and I were intrigued to try a product for pen-and-touch based Windows 8 tablets like the Surface Pro.

Firstly, let’s watch the 2-minute promotional video for StaffPad:

Amazing stuff?

Phillip Rothman explains, key to the way StaffPad works is its method of recognizing your scribbles. It looks at every individual stroke you make and then interprets what you wrote based on the relationship of each stroke to all of the others. Creator, David William Hearne says that “it’s more efficient and accurate to take the position and temporal information from the pen, and then use musical context to decide what the music is trying to be. That way, you can do things that would totally confuse OCR. Because we know the order of the strokes and where they are in relation to the notes, we can say, OK, that’s a natural, that’s a sharp.”

The real magic of StaffPad starts to become evident as you begin to move from bar to bar. All you need to do to move to any other bar is to simply start writing in it. You don’t need to finish writing in one bar; StaffPad won’t automatically fill the bar with rests. You don’t need to write in contiguous bars or select another bar to prime it.

Take a look at Philip Rothman notating some bars of Rite of spring!

Powerful Playback:

What we probably loved the most in our first experiment with this app was the ability to control and enhance the quality of the playback performance. If you've placed dynamics in your score, you’ll see the expression overlay reflect those dynamics. But you can further customize playback by drawing lines and curves to subtly enhance your score.

Listen to my husband, Carson’s partial transcription of Paraniod Andriod by Radiohead (which he did this morning sitting in a lounge chair and drinking coffee!) and hear some of the subtleties in playback reflecting a more natural and musical sounding performance.

Implications for Music Education.

There is no doubt that music educators will take serious note of the potential of this powerful application. In a time where the skills of traditional notation may well be a dying art and the desire for immediacy and authenticity in the front end of composing software is growing, StaffPad provides an exciting hybrid experience for students and teachers alike.

Particular opportunities which could enhance the teaching and learning experience within our music classes could include –

· Rhythmic and Melodic dictation exercises could be delivered and executed with great ease and fluency.

· The freedom to move about the score as ideas come forth, filling in only partial content within bars, is a level of highly significant intuition (lacking in other programs).

· The emphasis on expressive techniques in the notation and the opportunity to create phrasing and subtle musical balance in playback, is a fantastic artistic element adding to the aesthetic experience of music composing and arranging which is currently a bit clunky in other programs, sometimes detracting from the inventive ideas of the student composer.

· The comfort of working with a tablet, lying flat on the student’s table like a real score using a pen to notate could work incredibly well in classrooms.

· In the middle of a lesson, instrumental teachers could easily and quickly notate exercises, phrases, melodic ideas, bowing or tonging patterns and print them off for their students with greater ease and efficiency.

· Being an app available from the Windows Store, installation is a quick and easy process, which would be a great time saver for schools.

· The $70 for full access to the app is affordable and competitive.

All in all, this is an absolutely amazing application with exciting potential for Music Educators. Check it out!