Many professional music editors who edit digitally wish there were more user-friendly apps available for their profession. So what makes an app user-friendly?

Music editors use software to lay out notes on the staff and notate composers’ musical directions, such as tempo and dynamics, into scores. Many music editors have struggled to adapt their editing processes to non-user-friendly features in such software. Software applications for music editors can be improved to help any type of music editor work with greater ease.

THE RESEARCH 

In her 2023 paper “Understanding the Needs of Music Editors in a Digital World,” Anna Plaksin from Paderborn University conducted qualitative research to investigate gaps in user interface design in the digital world of music. She interviewed five experienced music editors who are well-versed in digital editing procedures for scholarly editions of musical scores of various genres. In her interviews, Plaksin gathered firsthand accounts of the participants’ daily workflows, needs, and frustrations. Her goal was to use their insights to help shape software, specifically a software application called Mei-friend, to be more user-friendly for any music editor.

From these interviews, Plaksin found two main results. First, music editing is complex, which can lead to errors in the editorial process. These errors can arise from the complexity the editor experiences when organizing sources and making decisions. Errors can also arise from the complexity the editor experiences when encoding music within the music-editing software application. Second, editorial approaches vary: Some editors may want to encode all the music while others may choose not to encode some of the music and instead include links to the existing images of the music.

This research enabled Plaksin to identify the actual tasks music editors complete regularly and to understand how current digital tools hinder or help the music editors’ work. The data she collected indicates that there is a need for improvement in the software for music editors. Plaksin stated: “The gathered results already hint at aspects of user interaction important for the development of any tool, like finding a common language to communicate elaborate intellectual concepts and lowering barriers to technology to enable a wide variety of levels of engagement” (47). With these gathered results, Plaksin translated her data into design recommendations for more interactive and user-friendly software.

The gathered results already hint at aspects of user interaction important for the development of any tool, like finding a common language to communicate elaborate intellectual concepts and lowering barriers to technology to enable a wide variety of levels of engagement.

Plaksin (2023)

THE IMPLICATIONS

Specifically, Plaksin provided the following recommendations.

  1. Because of the complexity of the music-editing processes, editors want to interact visually with their scores and avoid tedious manual encoding.
  2. Because of the errors that can arise from this complexity, editors would like an improved ability to navigate through their annotations and mark-ups.
  3. Because there is a lot of diversity in how music editors approach their work, editors would love access to digital tools that are flexible for different workflows rather than requiring one rigid structure.

Plaksin’s research ultimately informed the development of an application called Mei-friend, created by Werner Goebl and David M. Weigl, which is currently a promising music-editing software, but her research suggests that there is further need for studies that are centered on real-world editorial workflows to inform digital tool designs. Reducing technical barriers in digital editing creates greater possibilities for automatic markup management, visual edits, metadata entries, and so much more, thus allowing the profession of music editing to evolve while still supporting scholarly precision.

To learn more about the needs of music editors in digital contexts, read the full article:

Plaksin, Anna. 2023. “Understanding the Needs of Music Editors in a Digital World. Adding Support for Editorial Markup to the Mei-friend Editor.” DLfM ‘23: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology: 40–48. https://doi.org/10.1145/3625135.3625149

—Leah Laret, Editing Research

FEATURE IMAGE BY DANIEL FRIESENECKER

Find more research:

Take a look at Rachel Frei’s Editing Research article to learn about different ways that technology is becoming more user-friendly: “Editing Sentence Length for Screen Reader User Accessibility.” 

Read Madeline Hill’s Editing Research article to learn more about online editing tools for other types of editing: “Online Editing: The Effects of Technology on Future Editors.”