WEBVTT

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Well, those of you musically inclined will understand how difficult it is to write a score so that pieces of music can be shared with other performers.

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Computer software already exists that helps you write out the notes, but that is so yesterday.

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If you want to take scoring to a new level, there's an app for that. Here's Nick Glass. 

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I'm Sven Ahlback. I live in Stockholm. I'm a fiddle player. That's how I define myself.

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Folk musician, composer, professor and inventor -- Sven Ahlback has a surprising number of strings to his bow.

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I wanted to know to what degree is music really an [a] universal language.

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It began with him writing the computer program about the structure of music and how we hear it,

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and that led almost by accident to a discovery in 2002.

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Our product is called ScoreCloud.

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Our approach of this program is to play music and get the notations created from what you play.

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In other words, you sing, play or hum a tune, and out comes an instant score.

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I'm that kind of guy who gets songs in my head all the time.

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Once you get them in your head, you feel that this is... might be the next big hit.

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And then it's [there's] almost no limit to how fast it to [can] be notated. 

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And I was just improvising, playing music, not thinking about the notation.

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For one second, I double-clicked on the recording [and] suddenly have the notation here.

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I can now communicate to people around the world.

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It can be read by someone in China who plays the piano as well as my friend next door.

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Ahlback's company, DoReMIR Music, was launched in 2008.

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Now a team of ten is developing the technology.

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For now, we have like a quarter of a million users.

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If we think about the number of people who define themselves as musicians in some way, we're talking about around 500 million people around the world.

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So, I would think that this would be useful actually for at least a big portion of these 500 million people.

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Like these students at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

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It's really accurate from how we are playing, and that's a big wow, I think, you know.

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It won't necessarily make you a better composer but it should help free up your creative juices.

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Yeah, it's good.

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I'm not that fast at writing scores in the computer, but now it doesn't take that time.

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Now I just sing it, and if it's something that I wanna change or switch notes, I can just do it very easily.

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Music is as an important [a form of] human expression as is writing or text.

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A lot more people than [those who] today are able to compose or write music have interesting musical thoughts and musical ideas,

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and they should be able to express themselves with the help of our software.