“The Philadelphia Orchestra is rolling out a new way to make money: the LiveNote mobile app,” reports Peter Crimmins on Tuesday (12/5) at radio station WHYY (Delaware/Philadelphia). “For the past few years, the orchestra has been experimenting with LiveNote in concerts at the Kimmel Center. The app is able to ‘hear’ and recognize certain passages of music in the room and provide graphic and text information about that particular musical phrase on the user’s phone, in real time…. It was restricted to the orchestra’s base, Verizon Hall.… It is now available over cellular signals, … ‘in its new licensing, available where any institution chooses to make it available,’ ” said Philadelphia Orchestra President and CEO Alison Vulgamore. “With its licensing partner, InstantEncore, the orchestra plans to sell to other orchestras the rights to both the technology and content the orchestra has tailored for particular pieces of music … for example, explanations of Russian folk songs referenced in a symphony by Stravinsky…. Not all performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra will be LiveNote enabled, to preserve the purity of the concert experience. But Vulgamore says about a third of the season’s selections allows audiences to use the app, and that’s likely to increase.”
Posted December 8, 2017
