The BabelBox: An Embedded System for Score Distribution on Raspberry Pi with INScore, SmartVox and BabelScores

The slow but steady shift away from printed text into digital media has not yet modified the working habits of chamber music practitioners. If most instrumentalists still heavily rely on printed scores, audiences increasingly access notated music online, with printed scores synced to an audio recording on youtube for instance. This paper proposes to guide the listener and/or the performer with a cursor scrolling on the page with INScore, in order to examine the consequences of representing time in this way as opposed to traditional bars and beats notation. In addition to its score following interest for pedagogy and analysis, the networking possibilities of today’s ubiquitous technologies reveal interesting potentials for works in which the presence of a conductor is required for synchronization between performers and/or with fixed media (film or tape). A Raspberry Pi-embedded prototype for animated/distributed notation is presented here as a score player (such as the Decibel ScorePlayer, or SmartVox), in order to send and synchronize mp4 scores to any browser capable device connected to the same WIFI network. The corpus will concern pieces edited at BabelScores, an online library for contemporary classical music. The BabelScores pdf works, composed in standard engraving softwares, will be animated using INScore and video editors, in order to find strategies for animation or dynamic display of the unfolding of time, originally represented statically on the page.