This is a presentation I gave at the OHM2013 festival. After I finished, pianist Kimiko Ishizaka performed Bach and Chopin for ~2,000 of the event's attendees. After 20 years spent as a horn player, I discovered software development, open source, and Drupal in particular. Having spent 11 years helping the Drupal project grow up, Open Goldberg has helped me bring the two worlds together - music and software. These are the questions I'm going to try to cover in this presentation: -- What is Open Source Bach, and why do we need it? -- Notation and Technology:Why can't the internet read music? -- Is Open Goldberg the new model for the industry? -- What comes next? The Open Goldberg Variations team includes pianist Kimiko Ishizaka; MuseScore.com, the team that provides us with MuseScore, the open source notation program; and IMSLP.org, the online repository of public domain scores and recordings. We launched our fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, and in the process had the great fortune of becoming sponsored by Bösendorfer, who sent us a 290 Imperial to record with. Kickstarter also led us to Anne-Marie Sylvestre, the phenomenal record producer who produced and edited the recording. The Goldberg Variations were then recorded in world-famous Teldex Studio, Berlin, one of the most notable recording studios around. We distributed the recording and the score under the Creative Commons license so that they can be used in any way - they are in the public domain, worldwide. Creative Commons licensing didn't stop us from finding a publisher, though. GRIN - Print on Demand - Munich. Within one day of publishing, a very active Wikipedia editor and moderator added Kimiko Ishizaka's recording tracks to the article on the Goldberg Variations. High quality images and sound samples are often missing from Wikipedia because of copyright. We helped solve that problem for the Goldberg Variations. The results of our hard work can be found online at http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org. There you can listen to the recording, download the CD-quality files, and get a link to MuseScore.com where the score lives. At this point, I expect that you're asking yourself, What's open source about that? 4 Freedoms of Open Source Music -- Freedom to play or listen -- Freedom and ability to edit -- Freedom to distribute -- Freedom to remix The Four Freedoms of Open Source Music: -- Freedom to play or listen -- Freedom and ability to edit -- Freedom to distribute -- Freedom to remix This is the community I take inspiration from - the Drupal Community. They've taught me the importance of shared ownership, collaboration, sharing. Thank goodness for IMSLP - the biggest library of public domain photocopies of sheet music. Scores on IMSLP are essentially photocopies. Imagine if Wikipedia were scans of Encyclopedia Britannica. Notice what great handwriting Bach had. And the public domain editions are old and sometimes really crappy. No serious pianist would study this score for modern performance. Why can't I copy and paste notes on the internet? With an electronic score, I can teach you a bit about how fugues are built. With the photocopy version from IMSLP I'd have to use coloring crayons to do this. Electronic versions teach the computer what the music is supposed to sound like. It can then recognize the music when it hears it. That's how we broadcast the Open Goldberg Variations to the entire state of Wisconsin, and let people follow the music in their web browser - in real time! If storage of music data were standardized, and editable, we could have a Wikipedia for sheet music (that goes beyond photocopies) What does an "Open Goldberg" cost? Studio €10,000 Engineering and Mastering €5,000 Production €5,000 Promotion €10,000 Distribution €20,000 Pianist ??? €50,000 How much does it cost to do a project like Open Goldberg? At €50K, the value proposition has to be pretty incredible on both sides. What does an "Open Goldberg" cost? Value, ownership - dedications. The dedications from our top sponsors made the Open Goldberg Variations very personal and meaningful. In 2014 we're going to record the Well-Tempered Clavier and set it free. We have many partners, including MuseScore, IMSLP, Bösendorfer, GRIN Verlag, Parma Recordings, Daveconservetoire.org, and Anne-Marie Sylvestre. Starting September 24th at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany. Every one of the 12 concerts in the "Twelve Tones Tour" will be broadcast via Google Hangouts on Air.

• published: 14 Sep 2013
• views: 47