an observation

[kaberett]

Quite possibly the single most noticeable difference widespread smartphone usage has made to my life in the last ten years is the bit where, when in rehearsals you reach a movement where the horns are tacet, instead of each picking up a different book or newspaper... we all just pull out our phones (unison).

Comments

[kaberett]

Your correspondent writes from the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 1 for orchestra (Opus 43).

[recessional]

I love this image.

[kaberett]

:D

[khronos_keeper]

This is amazing :D

[kaberett]

THERE'S MUCH LESS RUSTLING

[cesy]

:)

[rmc28]

:-)

[pipisafoat]

fascinating! and perhaps better? it seems the phones would be quieter (when silenced) than the rustling of pages.

[kaberett]

There is the downside that the movements when horns have nothing to do tend to be generally quieter, yes! But even so there's not many of us so it's generally not a problem for rehearsals (at least provided we time our page-turns for sections that aren't very quiet...)

[jesse_the_k]

Are phones/tablets used to display the music you're reading?

[batrachian]

I would suspect not; between size/legibility concerns, not being able to make interim notations with That Bit Of Pencil, and potential DRM...stupidity, well.

Or maybe i'm just being a grognard remembering my days sorting out the music library with nostalgia glasses. Hard to say. :)

[kaberett]

Actually, a lot of our repertoire is on IMSLP (as an org the orchestra doesn't have heaps of money, so "stuff that can be borrowed from a library or printed out cheaply" is A Significant Concern). NEVERTHELESS you are quite right about pencils etc, so we only tend to work from phone/tablet displays of IMSLP downloads when we've screwed up and not managed to print/bring all the parts for all the instruments present...

[batrachian]

Ooh that is a lovely resource that I was previously completely unaware of! Nifty.

[kaberett]

Generally not, unless we screw up! In that a lot of the repertoire we play is on IMSLP, so if we've lost/forgotten to print/etc a part, it's often the case that someone can play off a phone or tablet screen for a rehearsal if necessary, though it's decidedly sub-optimal...

Oh!

[jesse_the_k]

I am so thrilled to learn about this excellent PD music resource.

Re: Oh!

[kaberett]

Isn't it splendid!

[ewt]

There is e-paper tech out there that is designed for playing scores, but it tends to be pretty expensive, and I'm not yet convinced that the page-turning capability is that great (theoretically you can hook up a foot pedal! I'd love to find bluetooth had dropped *that* in the middle of a tricky passage during a performance!) -- I think it's probably useful for individual musicians who have huge amounts of music to carry around with them to the point that the paper starts to take up lots of room, particularly for touring, but I'm less convinced that your average orchestral concert justifies the expense.

Backlit screens are not always great for situations where you're also trying to watch a conductor, I find. My own experiences with using a tablet for choral singing have been that the available software is okay-ish but the "I want to make an additional note on this bit" function needs A Lot Of Work before it will be anywhere near as useful as a pencil, and the reduced size is not great (My tablet is A5-ish and the music I'm singing from is A4 and scaled to be readable but still save paper at that size, so my options are twice as many page turns, or music twice as small; the latter is small enough that I'm likely to lose my place more easily). After trying this for a term I'm going back to printing my music out; I'll try again in a few years, or with a tablet that's a lot bigger or is e-ink rather than LCD (I have no plans to buy one otherwise, though).

I do know organists who play from an iPad fairly frequently, and that's a good application of "I want to carry approximately 8GB of repertoire around with me because you never know what someone will want for a funeral". (Foot pedal page turns are potentially less useful for us organists though!)

Plus, paper never gets a low battery.

I'm educated

[jesse_the_k]

...and grateful for it.

I'm imagining a display built-in to a keyboard console with A+ e-ink plus a front light.

Doesn't help the rest of the orchestra, however.

Re: I'm educated

[ewt]

At the moment the technology is moving fast enough that I wouldn't want it built into a keyboard console, especially for acoustic instruments where the possibility of following what you're doing to do the page turns at the right time is pretty low. Most music stands will hold a tablet pretty well.

There is a degree to which mass-produced woodpulp paper (rather than parchment or vellum) and engraved printing (rather than copying out parts painstakingly by hand) were necessary pre-requisites for the Romantic-era growth of the size of orchestras and the length of symphonies (in the way that the same things plus the cast-iron piano frame and rise of the middle class were prerequisites to piano music getting really popular and even profitable); if you're getting the whole lot printed then you may as well go big and long. (There are other factors too, like people who weren't the landed aristocracy starting to go to concerts qua concerts where the entire point was to listen to the music, and larger halls, and so on and so forth; I am not a historian of music and am probably leaving out or eliding a bunch of stuff.)

What we're missing in this conversation is not "Can we get e-paper to do what deadtree paper does, only a little bit better?" but rather "what can tablets/e-paper do that would be totally impossible with deadtree paper?" -- things like having a computer program that generates (playable!) sheet music on the fly based on the movements of people in the audience, for example. (That would be kindof evil for anyone who doesn't like sight-reading, but, hey.)

(And now I really do need to learn how to program. Damnit.)

Re: I'm educated

[jesse_the_k]

The interaction between technology and art is fascinating

Something tablets/e-paper could do would be transposition!

Re: I'm educated

[ewt]

I'm a horn player, I can generally transpose at sight anyway (though at the organ I prefer not to do this with anything too complex; there are a lot more notes at a time), and I always forget this is something other people might want...!

But if you have MusicXML or even MIDI for your part, you can transpose it and then print it out. If you have a PDF which is what most of the public domain scores will be in, you're out of luck anyway.

[silveradept]

Yes, but are you also looking in unison at the same thing?

[kaberett]

Pbbbbt :-p