Opportunities to Support Musicians' Score-based Practice with Context-Specific Annotations on Tablet

Musicians frequently annotate scores to draw attention to specific issues and interpretative choices as they learn and perform. Current tablet score readers merely replicate paper-based workflows, supporting only static annotations that cannot offer more information than users explicitly encode in them. We see significant opportunities to complement these annotations with features tailored to musicians’ evolving needs. We observed 17 musicians learning new pieces and conducted 10 interviews to better understand their practice habits and challenges. Building on their insights, we propose different kinds of context-specific annotations: system-generated feedback annotations that respond to performance like a teacher would, system-generated feedforward annotations that anticipate known difficulties, and user-made dynamic annotations that can be parameterized and systematically managed. We illustrate these through the design of five features implemented in Tactus, a tablet-based research probe, and report encouraging preliminary evaluation results. We discuss implications and next steps.