The goal of the Digital Music Lab is to offer library users a seamless environment in which they can create and work with digital audio and notated music in all forms, and to support the teaching and learning activities of the music curriculum.

Here are some examples of what users can do:

• compose at the digital piano & record the performance
• capture the performance as music notation, as it is played
• create professional-quality music scores
• scan printed music into electronic music notation
• import freely available MIDI files of musical works
• open and edit MIDI files as music notation
• create collaborative annotations linked to specific points in an audio file
• test various orchestrations of musical material, using virtual instruments
• analyze digital audio files
• capture audio from multiple sources, and route among applications as needed

With the planned addition of more advanced audio composition and programming software in 2011, a user might build a custom composition tool to generate musical material, create a tool to analyze the musical content of a performance, or program a utility that creates a sonification of a scientific data set, to explore the data by ear.

We welcome your comments and suggestions as you work in the Digital Music Lab—and if you'd like to tell us about your project, please let us know—we'd love to feature some of your work on our pages! You can contact us at musiclibrary@columbia.edu.