The Idea

The shift away from the PC to tablets in 2014 set the backdrop for an exciting collaboration between Rocket Farm, multi-national music conglomerate Yamaha and online music notation software provider, Noteflight. Yamaha wanted to leverage Noteflight’s music notation and sharing technology to create the world’s leading sheet music store and playback experience for the iPad.

Our Strategic Approach

The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.

While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.

Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.

Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.

Design

The Experience

UI Design

Rocket Farm’s first challenge was the design of the iPad application. The ‘easy’ part was designing the store: the part that would run in HTML5 wrapped in the native iOS app. The eCommerce Store was modeled after iTunes — it encourages free-form browsing of the catalog while allowing Yamaha’s marketers to feature different artists or themes to their audience.

Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Development

Making it work

The harder part of the design was how to take advantage of the rich set of gestures and interactions that the iPad offered, as well as the high-resolution graphics and audio capability to create an intuitive and graceful experience for the musician once a score was downloaded.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used