Enote sheet music app launches on App Store

The Enote app gives musicians instant access to a library of scores that have been reconstructed in a native digital format, making it possible to use sheet music in more flexible, streamlined and exploratory ways when compared to traditional sheet music.

The app attracted widespread publicity in the music world when it was announced in November 2020, attracting over 15,000 volunteer Beta testers and earning support from major cultural institutions including Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Pierre Boulez Saal.

The Enote library currently contains all instrumental parts of over 1,000 solo and chamber works and uses an artificial intelligence-based Optical Music Recognition (OMR) system to recognise and reconstruct scores with 99.9% accuracy. Finding and fixing the last 0.1% of mistakes in the library is Enote’s final hurdle, so the company is crowdsourcing expertise to help speed up the process.

Co-founder Josef Tufan said, ‘Finding errors in thousands of scores is a huge task for a small team of musicologists, but when thousands of users flag the errors that they come across while playing, the whole correction process can be much, much faster.’

Errors in Enote’s scores can be reported by musicians with just two taps. Enote’s musicologists then review and correct these misprints for all users, while engineering teams use the reports to find and fix the root cause of each issue. This immediately eliminates all similar occurrences from the library.

Enote aims to reconstruct thousands more chamber, solo and vocal works by the end of the year, before expanding even further into orchestral pieces, stage works, contemporary classical music and other genres. New scores are added to the library each week, and the company expects over 60,000 pieces to be available through the app within the next 24-months.

The app is free for anyone to try over the coming months while the library is being developed. The switch to a paid product (with a free trial) will likely happen around the end of 2021. Paying subscribers will have unlimited access to all of Enote’s content and features, which will include automatic page-turning, score previews and intelligent accompaniments. Enote is also working with publishers to secure licensing deals for contemporary content, which will make its library a central resource for all musicians.

The company has also committed to maintaining a free option for musicians to use, and will be investing resources back into projects that support the music community.

Co-founder Boian Videnoff said, ‘Bringing the world’s music into a consistent digital format unlocks opportunities you’d never imagine. From creating new revenue streams for living composers to improving the workflows of performing arts organisations, guiding students’ practice and transferring music notation to braille, our most exciting advancements are still to come.’