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UVA-QA-0581
SCOR-eSTORE.COM
Scor-eStore.com was not yet a companyit was still simply the ideas and experiments of two budding entrepreneurs. Mark Burgess, a graduate student in computer science, and Chris
Madsen, a professional musician, hoped it would become a company. They had both invested a lot of time and creativity to get where they were now.
Mark Burgess had created a prototype sheet-music viewer that could display sheet music on a PC screen, play it through the PC’s speakers, and print it on the PC’s printer, all via the
Web. For proprietary music, it would print the music only when purchased over the Web, and all transmissions would be encrypted. This viewer, unlike other viewers currently available, would, when completed, read files created by the popular notation software used by musicians to write and edit music. This capability would give the viewer a competitive edge by accepting music uploaded to the viewer on the Web. Composers could use the viewer to show their music to others, give them a chance to play the music (or a portion of it), and deliver printed sheet music on the Web, without ever giving the user an electronic copy that could be copied to others. By using additional existing software that transcribed pieces played on an instrument into an electronic musical-notation file, a composer could even create the music by playing it on an electronic piano keyboard or other instrument. At this point, however, the viewer was not fully functional, and testing would be needed to confirm that it would do all of these things in practice.
Chris Madsen had used the pilot of the viewer to convert a dozen selections of music into the viewer’s format, adding a lot