The design of a pen-based musical input system

Computerising the task of music editing can avoid a considerable amount of tedious work for musicians, particularly for tasks such as key transposition, part extraction, and layout. However the task of getting the music onto the computer can still be time consuming and is usually done with the help of bulky equipment. This paper reports on the design of a pen-based input system that uses easily-learned gestures to facilitate fast input, particularly if the system must be portable. The design is based on observations of musicians writing music by hand, and an analysis of the symbols in samples of music. A preliminary evaluation of the system is presented, and the speed is compared with the alternatives of handwriting, synthesiser keyboard input, and optical music recognition. Evaluations suggest that the gesture-based system could be approximately three times as fast as other methods of music data entry reported in the literature.