Enote
Digitizing Musical Heritage

Founded with a mission to improve musicians’ lives through technology and make quality sheet music accessible and affordable for everyone, Enote is a pioneer in bringing static sheet music into a flexible digital format. To do this, the company has developed an advanced AI-powered computer vision system for Optical Music Recognition (OMR) that is the most accurate in the world. “Digitizing centuries of music is a massive undertaking as it involves recognizing and reconstructing thousands of multi-instrument works, millions of score pages, and billions of individual notes and musical symbols,” says Boian Videnoff, Co-founder of Enote and Chief Conductor of the Mannheim Philharmonic. By digitizing the world’s musical heritage, Enote gives musicians unprecedented access to sheet music without the burden of high costs and physical space requirements, and enables powerful new features that make working with music scores even better.

Enote’s proprietary OMR system analyzes and recognizes music notation elements like note heads, stems, note flags, and more; before semantically reconstructing this notation by creating more high-level music structures and encoding them into native digital format. “Our OMR delivers results with unbelievable accuracy, by far surpassing all existing applications available in the market,” says Videnoff.

Enote’s score reconstruction process assesses multiple editions of every work to build a definitive version of each piece. As a result, Enote’s library contains a single, reliable work listing, with all corresponding instrumental parts (such as Violin I, Cello II Trombone, Percussion, Flute etc) in a consistent digital format. This consistent, flexible score format lets Enote’s team build advanced features that previously seemed impossible, letting musicians achieve in seconds what used to take weeks.

For instance, musicians can easily change the key of any piece, instantly highlight individual parts or groups of symbols across hundreds of pages, or quickly reference their instrumental part against a “full score” (multi-part conductor score). Enote’s well-catalogued library makes it easy for musicians to find the scores they need, or discover new works with powerful search filters. Users also have control of the size and format of the notes, and can use their mobile device to print out personalized copies of their scores whenever and wherever they are needed.

Though Enote has not launched in the market, over 9000 musicians have already registered to take part in its beta testing program. “We have also set up partnerships with some world-class institutions (Staatsoper Unter den Linden & Pierre Boulez Saal) and have been approached for important crossovers we hadn’t even considered, such as making our digital score material available to blind musicians through Braille,” says Videnoff.

On top of their core product, Enote is already working on advanced AI features that will change what’s possible with sheet music. An automatic page-turning feature that recognizes the user’s playing as notation and turns pages at the perfect moment is almost complete, and the company are working on Natural Audio Synthesis advancements to create realistic previews of scores, or let musicians practice with an AI-powered accompanist. Enote are also working on Artificial Composition capabilities that leverage the advanced musical understanding of its AI’s to “arrange” existing pieces for different ensemble types, music styles, and skill levels.

Enote launches publicly through Apple’s App Store in 2021, and the company hope to expand to other platforms in future. The Enote library will contain thousands of works at launch, and will grow exponentially within the first 18 months. The app will be available to a global market, giving musicians everywhere more access to music than ever before.