DR. JACK M. JARRETT: We’ll begin our demonstration by showing you one of the special features of Notion. This is called our In Tempo. In Tempo allows me to actually conduct the playback of the music, and I do this by tapping the rhythm. The rhythm we can see at the very top of the score, it’s notated, and it’s notated in such a way as to control the different musical events that are taking place that would coincide with that actual rhythm. I can change tempo from note to note, and therefore I can work with live musicians and give them the freedom that they would need to interpret, and particularly with a song like this which is full of all kinds of rubato. So, Liz Harvey is going to sing Musetta’s waltz song from La Boheme by Puccini, okay? Here we go.

[LIZ HARVEY SINGING MUSETTA’S WALTZ SONG FROM LA BOHEME BY GIACOMO PUCCINI WITH ACCOMPANIMENT FROM NOTION 3]

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

LIZ HARVEY: Thank you. Thank you.

DR. JACK M. JARRETT: That was Liz Harvey who’s a member of our company. Notion is a totally integrated product which combines notation with he orchestral playback of a notated score, and it really consists of three components, one being the notation interface which you’ll see here, which I will demonstrate in a minute, and it also has a very powerful sampling playback mechanism which able to control as many as a thousand or more notes at any given moment. It’s an extremely powerful engine, and it has a full complement of orchestral sounds recorded by the principal players of the London Symphony Orchestra, recorded in the Abbey Road Studios in London.

We see it as a professional tool for composers and arrangers and educators and performers, and also as an optimum learning environment for music students at all levels because it provides the feedback from the notation, from the sound, and allows people to experiment and whatever trial by error but this is a very good way to learn. So, we have all of that.

To give you an idea of how the program works as far as the notation is concerned, if you want to build a score, you can select a template to begin with or you can simply put together your own score. I’m going to select let’s say violins, viola, cello, and bass. I’ll put in another violin section, and here’s my score for string orchestra. Now, the first thing I’m going to be doing is putting in normal notational marks. It asks for a time signature. I can go over here, I can select a number of different common signatures, or I can say other and I can come down to this properties box and edit and it becomes my cursor. I bring the cursor back into the score, click the mouse, and there we are.

If I want a key signature, I come back up here and select key signatures. Let’s say D major, bingo. There it is in the score. You’ll notice that all of the items over here on this side bar are no more than one level deep. So, when I bring this back up and say I want to look at clefs, there they are. If I want repeats, there’s all kinds of repeats and so forth.

Down here, I have articulations, I have ornaments, I also have tempo markings. Let’s pick one of those. Let’s say allegro, I can now edit what the tempo would be, quarter note equals let’s say 100 instead of 112. I bring that over here, it’s my cursor. I’m going to plop it into the score by clicking, just like the other thing.

Now, I can get notes over here. I can say there’s a quarter note, but much simpler is to use the keyboard shortcuts, which are very, very easy to remember: “q” equals quarter note. If I hit “q” twice, I get quarter rest, so I’m tackling between note and rest. “E” for eighth note, same deal. “S” gives me sixteenths, “T” gives me twenty-seconds -- or thirty-seconds, “H” for half note, “w” for whole note. Now, you’ll notice that all of these note names are right under the left hand on the keyboard, so it’s very convenient. I got my hand on the keyboard, left hand and right hand controlling the mouse, determining where the notes are.

So, let’s say I’ll put in here a quarter note, a couple of eighth notes, maybe a couple of more eighth notes, some sixteenth notes, and I’m going to put another note in and finally another note, and this one you’ll notice turns red. Why? Because it’s telling me that there’s more notes in this bar than the signature calls for. So, I’m going to pick that one out, and put a bar line in. I do this by hitting the “I” key, which looks like a bar line.

If I want a sharp, I go up to the “3” key because it looks like a sharp. So, in other words it’s really easy to remember what these keys are. And at any moment, we can actually play this.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

Now, suppose I want that somewhat more legato. What I do is I put in a slur, we can put it all the way across...,

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

...and we get a more slurred sound. If I don’t want that, if let’s say I want all of these notes to be staccato, I can actually choose it as a group and say let’s add staccato, and now I have a bunch of staccatos.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

And we’re actually going to record it staccato sound from the string section. Let’s say we want an accent here. Well, let’s put a staccato accent maybe on these two notes. Let’s put just a regular accent here.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

On my “F” key, I have a bunch of forte type symbols. So I can now, say let’s start forte, I ‘m going to pull up a crescendo mark, take it all the way over to here. We’ll put another note in in the next bar, and we’ll say we’re going to crescendo all the way up to three f’s (fff). We’re going to decrescendo down to say a mezzo piano.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

So, it’s basically it’s doing all of these marks that I’m putting into this score. Let’s call this mezzo forte instead and let’s put in a trill. Okay.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

We got a trill. So, I believe you get the point, and by the way this is a string section so let’s try something a little different. Let’s tell it that we’re going to pizzicato, and I’ve got my cymbals a little too large here, and I can’t control that but I’m not going to bother right now. Then we’re gonna get this...

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

...and back to the trill again. So, that gives you an idea. All the editing for the playback is done with conventional notation symbols. There’s no bothering with things like patches or patch numbers or any kind of tweaking behind the scenes which means that once you’ve taken the score and edited it to make it sound exactly the way you want, you can then extract the parts, print them out, give them to a live orchestra, and expect that that orchestra will know what to do, and in fact I’ve had the experience now of doing just this very thing, and the orchestra knows what these marks mean, so it’s exactly the same thing. So, you see what I mean when I say it’s both a learning experience and a professional tool.

The program also will send the playback information directly to this as a wave file, so the program can generate it’s own wave files. You can also -- and let me pull up another score here to show you this -- Let’s say I want to hear only -- go back to the top of this -- Let’s say I want to hear the second violins alone. I can simply isolate them and tell them to play.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A MELODY WRITTEN IN NOTION]

So, I can proofread my score a part of the time. I can also, if I wanted to give in to some high tech things with this program, I could have the program record each separate instrument as a separate wave file, and then I can call those files up into a program like Pro Tools or Vegas and have them, they would automatically be synchronized so you could then do any extra editing and so forth. However, I will say this. We’re not using any plugins, we’re not using reverb. What you’re hearing is the actual ambience that was recorded in the Abbey Road studios, and that means that after the tone, after a note stopped sounding, there was an echo in the hall which we recorded. Now, when we played a note, we go to that same echo at the end of that note so we’re getting the actually ambience in the hall. However, if I want to change that, I can actually control the amount of decay that’s attached to each note so I can pull this all the way down to zero and tell the score to play, and I’m going to hear a very dry performance.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING “JUPITER” GUSTAV HOLST’S “THE PLANETS” IN NOTION]

Now, if I go back to my mixer here, and so let’s pull that all the way up to 100 and play the same thing.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING “JUPITER” GUSTAV HOLST’S “THE PLANETS” IN NOTION]

So, you get the idea that this can be controlled separately per instrument. Each instrument could be actually given it’s own amount of this reverb and so forth so that you actually have a great deal of control. Also, you can pan the instruments right, left, wherever you want.

Just to give you an idea of the power of the -- Let me go back and find this file.-- the power of the playback driver, I got a piece here that was written by one of our own staff, and in it he asked the cellos to play a chromatic run. Now, this chromatic run includes all the quartertones in between the half steps, so at which the score by the way which we support in the score. Now, we also have a pedal mark down here. Now, most cellos don’t have a pedal but we do, so when we put that pedal on, all of these notes sustain, there are about a hundred of them, by the end of this bar you’re hearing all hundred notes. They’re all crescendo-ing. Immediately after that, here’s a series of clusters here, and the keyboard instruments, with lots and lots of notes as you can see. Now, the program is able to look ahead, see what’s coming up, load the sounds it needs into memory in advance, put together chords like this in such a way that all the notes sound immediately as one sound rather than one at a time. This is because we’re not using MIDI as our internal driver. We have our own code which is much more powerful. So, I’ll play these bars for you.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A SCORE IN NOTION]

Here comes the cello.

[DR. JACK M. JARRETT PLAYING A SCORE IN NOTION]

Try this stuff. And you’ll notice that while it’s doing all of that, I’m able to scroll the screen around, move the cursor, and do all these kinds of things. So, what that means is that we have a very efficient system and we’re using the CPU and the memory, handling it very well, all this coming by the way from a laptop, and the sound is coming directly from the internal sound card of the laptop. We’re not using any special equipment externally.

When you buy the program, this is what you get. You get all of this in within one -- It takes about 3 GB off of your hard drive because of the samples. They take up about that much space. We recommend a minimum of 512 of RAM memory and a CPU that runs at least 1.5 GHz. Other than that,p there’s no particular requirements and the program should work just fine.

The files that are made from this, the file that generates this what you see on the screen, is relatively small. It’s really a file that contains the notation information, not the playback, not the music itself. Those files are about on the order of something like a Microsoft Word file or something like that which means they’re much smaller than MP3 or a wave file. You can send them through the mail.

Now, if another person has this same program on the other side of the continent and receives this same file in the mail, he plugs it in, he’s going to hear exactly the same thing, all the same sounds, everything. So, it’s not necessary to pass information in the musical form. We can do it as document files.

The program, in addition to what I’ve showed you in the way of note entry and so forth, the program reads XML files so it can import files from Sibelius and Finale. It can import files from scanning programs that will create XML, and we have MIDI input, several types of MIDI input from keyboard, which you can actually see demonstrated out in our stations outside of here.

So, that’s an overview of the program.