Composing by Pen: Exploring the effectiveness of a system for writing music notation on computers via pen input

For centuries pens have been used to write music notation on paper. Music notation in computer systems is usually entered by computer transcription of MIDI performance, or mouse selection and placement from pallets of note symbols. This paper presents the findings from an empirical exploration of a system for music notation on computer using pen input with simplified gestures. The results indicate that whilst there appear to be many benefits to such an approach, particularly the flexible placement and actuate editing of symbols, the implementation employed is considered overly error prone and suffering from inadequate hardware support, in the form of on-screen drawing with the pen, to be compelling. In addition, the absence of audible feedback and performance capture were considered significant disadvantages by the users. Despite these shortcomings, mostly not direct pen concerns, the results forecast that for music notation entry, pen input may be preferable to mouse input and that gesture recognition may be quicker than the pallet-selection techniques most often employed in current music systems. In short, the potential of pen input is not devoid of context