MusicWriter Inc, which says only that it has offices in Northern and Southern California, has applied computer technology to the thoroughly low-tech business of sheet music, coming up with a distribution system with concurrent access to a database of as many as 20,000 titles. Designed as a computer-based, in-store station for music retailers, the MusicWriter will enable customers to choose from a vast assortment of sheet music titles, licensed from catalogues of the world’s leading music publishers. The in-store personal computer with colour screen is linked by phone to a host computer at MusicWriter headquarters, and the customer’s selection – rock, jazz, country and classical – is printed out on a laser printer using a music notation software package that provides publishing house-quality document resolution. The selected song can also be transposed in any key and several lyric languages, with choice of scoring for combinations of piano, guitar and vocals, and a variety of other musical instruments. The song can also be recorded as MIDI data onto 3.5 floppy in a variety of formats, including the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS personal computers, or into synthesiser cartridges from the likes of Roland, Yamaha and Casio. The MusicWriter system, available to retailers in spring 1990, will be provided by MusicWriter, and the retailer will simply be required to provide a telephone line for linking to the system’s built-in modem. Customer cost for one piece of music printed out on the laser printer is expected to be about $3 – the same sort of price as you pay for a piece of old-fashioned sheet music. The company hasn’t worked out yet how much it will cost to programme your synthesiser to give a rendition Beethoven’s Ninth, complete with choral parts.
