Our latest #Disney film project #Lilo_and_Stitch is in theaters Friday, May 23rd! SoS transcribed sung vocals to create sheet music for #localization into dozens of languages. Learn more at https://symbolsofsound.com/2025/05/21/lilo-stitch/

#filmmusic #music #dubbing #musicnotation

This video—published just one week but I only watched just now—was how I learned that Finale was finally discontinued last year. Wow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqaon6YHzaU

I'm not a music student, I studied communications in college, but I did dabble in a little bit of music back then and I once used Finale to write down one single little, /very amateurish/ classical guitar etude in Finale that I had messed around with on my guitar for years by then at the time. The finale file might still be somewhere among my old hard drives & old PCs, might even be somewhere in my Google Drive or MS OneDrive or DropBox or something. I doubt I could convert it to MusicXML to rescue it at this time, even if I could find it again.

Anyways, loved the video. Very surreal. One hour long fair warning.

(And yes my use of em dashes in this post is intentional.)

#Tantacrul #Finale #GUIsoftwareDesign #MusicNotation #YouTube

Virtually every proposed replacement to score notation is just some variation of the piano roll. Every few years someone proposes some "revolutionary" approach to music notation and it's just the piano roll.

#musicology #music #MusicHistory #MusicNotation #youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

Blog Question Challenge: Technology Edition

It’s my turn to do the blog question challenge, technology edition! I’ve been tagged by James.

When Did You First Get Interested in Technology?

You have to understand that I consider “technology” as something “more than electricity, binary code, recording, or the Internet. It is the long pattern of humankind observing our surroundings and finding ways to adapt them…” — check out the whole textbook I wrote on this subject! 😁 Honestly, as a history nerd, I love exploring how humanity has adapted and reconceptualized our surroundings in all sorts of ways throughout the eons of our existence…

For me right now, these are the two answers that come to mind:

What’s Your Favorite Piece of Technology All-Time?

I can’t choose just one, seriously…but here are my top two…

What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?

In no particular order…

The mid-century mechanical pegs on my acoustic violin: So my violin is more than 100 years old, but at some point in the mid-1900s, some previous owner had swapped out the normal friction pegs for mechanical pegs (they could have originally been banjo or mandolin pegs…?). I have to carry a screwdriver in my violin case for the rare occasion if a screw loosens and therefore a string starts falling flat, but otherwise these work fantastically well! My strings generally stay in tune even in adverse weather; plus the appearance gives my fiddle a really unique character! 🙂

My music recording set-up: My DAW (Logic Pro), my notation software (Dorico), my microphones, my audio interface (EVO 8), even a way cool iPad app called Audio Kit Synth One that creates fabulous digital synth presets… everything I need to make my music come to life and be able to be shared far and wide!

My 6-string electric violin: What else can I say–I adore her! She’s a Dragonfly model from the Electric Violin Lutherie in New York. The sixth string allows me to play almost to the bottom of a cello’s range… 🙂 You can hear a fabulous example of what she’s capable of on this EP…

Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have in 25 Years!

I mentioned this a bit earlier in this post, but I’m really hoping we find a better system for sharing music that is more freeing for both artists and listeners, where we all can enjoy and share various kinds of niche art for art’s sake, without needing to cater to the billionaire mega-corporations that have always held sway over what gets heard and what is even allowed to make any kind of money (e.g., Spotify’s decision not to pay any track that gets less than 1,000 streams in a year, which affects over half the songs on the platform). Maybe we’ll find an answer in adapted blockchain tech?… Maybe we’ll go back to favoring the collection of physical media? Maybe something blending the two ideas…? I don’t know… But that’s my hope.

Final Thoughts…

I am always and forever blown away that some of humanity’s biggest technological inventions came at first to enhance our ability to make music and art [take the wind-wheel for example: it was first put to use by Heron of Alexandria to power his own hydraulis–which, originally created in the 3rd century BCE by Ctesibius of Alexandria, was the world’s first keyboard instrument and the direct ancestor of the pipe organ; and the world’s first programmable machine was a “robotic flute player” invented by the Banu Musa Brothers in Baghdad in the 9th century (CE).]!!

Get this: The earliest evidence for textiles and sewing needles dates back to 30,000 and 61,000 years ago respectively. The oldest bone flute discovered dates back to at least 60,000-40,000 years ago, depending on who you ask. Basically music-making with complex instruments is at least as old as the beginning of making clothes. 😉

Who Will Participate Next?

I challenge Adam to complete the challenge! Tag, you’re it. 🙂

#commodore #electricViolin #musicHistory #musicNotation #musicTechnology #retroVideoGames #technology #vic20 #violin

Welcome to Mastodon, @MusicEncoding !
The Music Encoding Initiative is a community-driven and open-source effort for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure.
https://music-encoding.org

The tools and resources they help create are free to all, and they are one of the most welcoming and friendly communities I know.

#musictheory #classicalmusic #musicnotation #lilypond #musescore

O.k. So I've been using Sibelius for a little over two weeks now, having switched from Finale. (Did you know Avid offers a heavily discounted perpetual license for Finale users? They do, you just have to dig to find it)

Things I love about Sibelius right now:
Everything to in the "Review" tab.

Things I suspect I will enjoy once I get used to them: All the stuff around copying\pasting notes

Thing I'll be o.k. with once I get used to: not having a floating tool bar that is full of arcane symbols

Thing I instinctively hate: all the icons in the top ribbon looking like they were designed after the mid 90s.

#Sibelius #MusicNotation #Composition