OpenScore aims to make sheet music accessible and adaptable for everyone, for any purpose. Whether you are a musicologist, publisher, teacher or student who is learning to read music. Whether you are an experienced composer producing his own medleys or newborn arranger making copies to share with friends. Furthermore, the unlocked open data is an endless source for smart adaptations for blind and partially sighted, gamers, developers or visual artist.
OpenScore.cc wants to bring static sheet music to life again. By creating new interactive editions, we can unlock endless possibilities. A true tipping point in music history! Think of it as the Google Maps of sheet music. Because, unlike music on paper or PDF, digital scores allow convenient playback, editing and sharing. Digital scores can also be parsed by software tools for research, analysis and machine learning purposes.
'The OpenScore editions are of vital importance to anyone who would struggle to read ordinary music notation. This includes musicians who are blind, partially sighted, or have trouble reading music due to a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia.'
Thomas Bonte, CEO MuseScore
The goal of the project is ambitious: with the help of the online community, OpenScore aim to transfer history’s most influential pieces from paper into interactive scores which you can listen to, edit and share. The aim is to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers by making their scores freely available in MuseScore’s MSCZ format.
This enables convenient sharing, adaptation and playback across a range of devices, including computers, phones and tablets. The scores will also be available in various other formats, including PDF, MIDI and MusicXML, as well as accessible formats like Braille and Modified Stave Notation for blind and partially sighted musicians. A true revolution!
What's more? The OpenScore editions will be released into the Public Domain using Creative Commons Zero, allowing unlimited copying, adapting and sharing. Check: the sky is the limit, without having to pay a penny.
Digitizing public domain music is a huge undertaking. That’s why we will harness the power of the online community to produce crowdsourced transcriptions. OpenScore brings together the two largest sheet music communities to tackle this challenge: MuseScore and IMSLP. After transcription, all scores will be fully checked and reviewed to assure accuracy with the original pieces. Together, we can unlock old sheet music for free for everyone.
After setting up an actionable strategic roadmap, We Are Tribe and OpenScore created an animation movie, wrote newsletters and social media posts to address the online MuseScore community, built an OpenScore website, wrote a press kit and ran a Kickstarter campaign in June 2017 to raise the initial funding required.
The OpenScore Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded! Thanks to the generous support of over 1000 backers, we managed to raise over €51000, allowing OpenScore to start developing the tools and infrastructure necessary to liberate all public domain sheet music.
The backers selected the first 100 works to be liberated and the first creative applications look promising! But there are many more to come! You can still help by transcribing these pieces into notation software while OpenScore develop the crowdsourcing platform. Together, we can make sheet music accessible to everyone. For free, for any purpose, for evermore!
And stylish too! Each OpenScore Edition received a unique cover image designed by digital artist Nicholas Rougeux. The cover image is a visual representation of the music in the score.
