Music notation programs force composers to follow the many rules of the staff notation when writing music and constantly seek to optimize symbol placement, making numerous adjustments automatically. Even though this impedes their creative process, many composers still use them throughout their workflow, for lack of a better option. We introduce EuterPen, a music notation program prototype that selectively relaxes both syntactic and structural constraints while editing a score. Composers can input and manipulate music symbols with increased flexibility, leveraging the affordances of pen and touch. They can make space on, between and around staves to insert additional content such as digital ink, pictures and audio samples. We describe the iterative design process that led to EuterPen: prototyping phases, a participatory design workshop, and a series of interviews. Feedback from the participating professional composers indicates that EuterPen offers a compelling and promising approach to music writing.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713488
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)