A potential new musical tool

June 19, 10:39 AMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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I am toying with a notion that a popular e-book device just might have the potential to become a breakthrough musical tool as well.

Somewhere out in the periphery of the computer world stand those specialized computers known as e-readers. They are to regular computers as the iPod is to a regular computer -- i.e., although the computer can do what the iPod does, an iPod (or the equivalent) is designed to carry out a specific subset of a computer's functions in a particularly felicitous manner, in this case playing music and videos. Think of an e-reader as the equivalent of an iPod for electronic books rather than recorded music.

An e-reader differs from a general-purpose computer such as a Mac or Windows PC in a few critical ways:

• It uses "eInk" technology in the place of the standard LCD screen. Acting a bit like a kid's Etch-A-Sketch, eInk is much easier on the eyes for long periods of reading and doesn't require constant power to retain an image; once the "ink" patterns are set on the screen, they can sit there on their own. Furthermore, an eInk screen does not require a backlight and is not washed out to invisibility in sunlight.
• It is designed to be held for reading and is typically a tablet of some type, not a clamshell like a laptop computer and certainly not something propped up on a desk behind a keyboard like a computer monitor.
• It is connected to a mechanism for delivering books, possibly tied into one specific vendor but more likely able to acquire material from a variety of sources, including its primary vendor. In this it operates very much like an iPod, which is tied to the iTunes Store and its matching iTunes software, but which can also be loaded with material from other sources.
• It may be able to handle digital books with specific forms of copy-protection, again much like digital audio players.
• It will have an interface designed specifically for reading books, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

Most of the computer-industry pundits will tell you that the whole e-book shebang hasn't really achieved critical mass as of yet; they're right about that, but the earth is shifting under their feet. The e-book world has stubbornly refused to vanish into the night, despite dire predictions in that direction, and of late has been experiencing a definite surge.

A lot of that momentum has come about due to Amazon's Kindle, a device which piggybacks off the web's best-known book retailer. Amazon makes it possible to buy a book for the Kindle right from the device itself, or just as easily online via Amazon's familar "1-Click" technology. No plugging in of cables is required; the books are delivered over a 3G network Amazon calls Whispernet. (In the absence of a Whispernet connection, books can be loaded onto a Kindle via a standard USB connection; it's just like coping a file to a USB thumb drive.)

I hadn't given the Kindle much thought as a musical tool; after all, it is an e-reader with a small, paperback-book screen, which renders it extremely awkward for viewing printed music -- electronic copies of which are mostly in PDF format, displayed only so-so on the Kindle if at all.

But the advent of the Kindle DX has changed my mind. While I allow that the Kindle DX is not about to replace anybody's music library any time soon, there is a great deal of promise here.

The DX's larger screen (almost 10" diagonal) plus its new ability to display most PDFs quite clearly changes the game. You can view printed music quite well on the screen, one full page at a time. Because even on a 10" screen the notation might wind up too small for comfort, the DX's new ability to rotate the screen (by rotating the device, à la the iPhone) allows for a wider page width and thus increased size. (Although in landscape rotation you can't see the length of the entire page.)

The Kindle has the ability to play mp3 files, but something that might be a really interesting development would be for it to play Scorch files -- that being the web-enabled format developed with Sibelius music notation software. Scorch files are notation, but they can also be played directly from within the web browser. The Kindle is close to having that ability -- already it has a rudimentary web browser -- so one could imagine this becoming a feature within a few iterations of the product cycle.

I can also imagine a Kindle with a larger screen yet -- so as to be able to reproduce a page of music at full size -- with a foot-pad page-turning accessory as well.

At that point the Kindle can become a competitor to the MusicPad, a hardware-software system designed to be used for displaying sheet music electronically (and handling page turns the like), or MusicReader software, which runs best on a Windows-based Tablet PC and does much of the same. Both MusicPad and MusicReader suffer from relatively low visibility -- they're both fine products -- while Amazon's visibility is anything but low. Furthermore, the Kindle is a general e-book device, and offers one consistent interface for books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and many PDF files, so its use is potentially much broader.

The eInk is perhaps just a bit too slow to refresh the page to be altogether perfect for displaying one's music during a concert, but improvements are bound to come.

And of course some innovative company (think fruit) could cough up a device that would elevate the whole tablet-reader-thingy technology to an entirely new level.

But even apart from musical considerations, the Kindle DX is a wonderful piece of gear; I haven't bonded with a device this thoroughly in a good long time. Easy to use, comfortable to handle, capacious (4 GB of memory), and with a sharp, attractive eInk screen, I'm finding in the Kindle a sense of rightness that I encountered with the iPhone, another device that became an integral part of my life almost instantaneously.

The tech future isn't always clear, but even with that uncertainty the present offers up some dandy stuff.