Music alphabet for lowresolution touch displays

In this paper we present a novel approach to writing music on handheld pen-based devices which has been developed during the implementation of MusicMan, our pen-based music score editor. A new alphabet of music symbols has been designed especially for use on devices with small screens by musicians skilled in writing the music by hand. Our alphabet is based on simplification of the common Western music notation symbols, making them easier to write on PDA while retaining their overall feel. A user study described in this paper revealed that the alphabet is significantly faster, easier-to-use and more accepted by the first-time users of PDA than the state-of-art method for pen-based writing of music. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Ergonomics, Input devices an