

The app had to support page turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode. The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. 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. For the NoteStar application, Yamaha was also able to secure content licenses from the two largest libraries of sheet music in the world: Hal Leonard and MusicSales. 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 in order to capture the shifting behavior in their target user.

Yamaha, founded in 1887, is the world’s largest manufacturer of musical instruments, and one of the world’s leading on-line music stores for purchasing sheet music. The shift away from the PC to tablets sets the backdrop for an exciting collaboration between Rocket Farm, multi-national music conglomerate Yamaha, and online music notation software provider, Noteflight.įounded in 2008, Noteflight is an online music application that allows users to write their own sheet music with playback, save their progress, and print their work when finished – all in a standard web browser. iPads still rule the tablet market, accounting for two-thirds of the sixty million tablets sold in 2011. With the recent flood of smart phones and tablets into the consumer market, companies have an exciting new medium that has created new channels through which they can sell their products.
