LiveScores: Bridging the Gap Between Paper and Digital

As in art, for hundreds of years only very few were able to write down, engrave and print music, requiring years of apprenticeship, talent and time. Even smaller the number of those who could (and can) “hear” the music from merely looking at notes – huge barriers making it very difficult to start and enjoy actively engaging with music.

Open the paper score of a piece you have never heard – a song, a sonata, a symphony. Look at the hundreds, thousands of notes. Who would not dream of a magic wand to make it sing, to bring it to life?

Newzik now offers this bridge between two worlds: the one of paper scores, and the one of digital scores, with our newly released AI-driven Optical Music Recognition technology, Maestria.

Take a picture of your sheet music, press play, and listen to the music – enjoy a living, dynamic partner instead of dry ink on paper.

Sounds fairly technical, and in the background it is.

Take a picture of your sheet music, press play, and listen to the music. Transpose it, play it faster or slower, turn off your part and play along with the accompaniment only, 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 living, dynamic partner instead of dry and dusty notes on paper.

What are we doing? A powerful AI-driven engine, in fact: the most advanced existing, analyzes the image of your sheet music and transforms it with a reliability of nearly 100% into a digital format.

We open this new vibrant world of scores to you in Newzik, fully adaptive, fully interactive, fully collaborative – while fully protecting copy, performance and exploitation rights.

And not only the music is transformed, also all metadata – composer, title, tempi, dynamic indications, fingerings, bowings, breathing marks, it’s the full range of information until now petrified in black dots of ink on paper which we bring to live. Dancing polka dots!

“Music education without digital tools has become unimaginable, and Newzik as fully collaborative and versatile tool will become even more useful with Maestria, this fascinating new OMR engine.”

David Mash, Berklee College of Music, Boston

Performing and studying music has a good portion of serious sports: the stability of print, the familiarity with a pattern, an image of the music, are important factors for musicians. This is often an intimate relationship, and moreover, sheet music represents the precious artisanry of generations of engravers, in many cases centuries old.

In Newzik, we marry the best of these two worlds in what we call LiveScore an intelligent, interactive format that allows you to keep your preferred – like Urtext – editions, while offering the unique benefits of a dynamic, digital score.

Press play and listen to the music, still reading it from your familiar typeset, enjoy the dynamics of a digital format without having to give up the intimacy with your sheet music – for jazz standards as well as Beethoven 9 or an exciting new piece of contemporary music.

“Our innovation of digital scores was immediately embraced by many colleagues in the technical departments in Vienna State Opera – the stage managers for example won’t live without anymore. We choose Newzik also because access to the most up-to-date editions of all important works directly from publishers is key for our work as leading operas. Our houses are still full of scores and parts – our libraries need this new bridge between paper and digital.”

Dominique Meyer, Sovrintendente La Scala, Milano

We believe the sheet music you need is not a new digital edition, but instead the one you are used to working on, rehearsing, playing, performing. This is why we closely cooperate with publishers, whose huge contribution to the ecosystem of music during the past 300 years until today - and for the future - we fully acknowledge. We do not see ourselves as digital publishers: we guarantee the responsible use of the game changing tool we are laying in your hands.

“Newzik has been a gamechanger for us since we first met and created UEnow, and this last incredibly difficult year 2020 has made clear for everybody in the entire world of music how indispensable digital technologies are. Maestria, the OMR engine by Newzik and LiveScores will once again change the game, and we are happy to shape it together.”

Astrid Koblanck, CEO Universal Edition, Vienna

Newzik fully integrates this breakthrough OMR engine and the easy handling of LiveScores with a secure channel of distribution to individual musicians and institutional users like ensembles, orchestras or operas. This makes our tools especially powerful for composing and arranging: we open a new world of distributing and promoting music, by bridging the gap between analog and digital.

At Newzik, we believe in the freedom of choice instead of fencing in content in exclusive catalogues, and in openly making available the most advanced tools instead of hiding them away in the background. We invite everybody in the world of music – professional musicians, amateurs, teachers and students, bands and ensembles of any genre, composers, publishers – to enjoy the benefits of this revolutionary jump from a cumbersome 18th-century paper past into a future full of life and collaboration.

“Since long I’ve been working on integrating digital technologies into music making and teaching. This year 2020 with all its restrictions has brought a totally new dimension of distance learning – with benefits that are here to stay. Music education without digital tools has become unimaginable, and Newzik as 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