Musician. geek entrepreneur. Even if it doesn’t quite fit together at first – Boian Videnoff is all that. The son of a singer and a violinist first studied piano at the Mannheim University of Music, then conducting. He has performed at the Elbphilharmonie, the Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Stuttgart Liederhalle.
Videnoff describes himself as a “relatively digital guy”: “I always have the latest gadgets and apps and everything.” He has been the founder of a digital start-up in Berlin since 2018, which currently employs 50 people and has just completed its first major financing round prepared. Videnoff wants to absorb twelve million euros. He is currently speaking to various VCs for this.
“Everything I do, I do with complete conviction,” says the 35-year-old. And: “I believe that technology, used correctly, can inspire people to be even more creative.” In the end, it fits together that a conductor programs an app.
That’s what Enote is: an app for smartphones and tablets full of sheet music. Symphonies, operas, concerts. Simple pieces of music for practicing as well as demanding works by great masters. For amateur musicians and professional musicians. Videnoff and his team have already digitized more than 18,000 works, and he says several hundred are added every week.
You can see that in the office of the start-up on Alexanderplatz: in the hallway there are trolleys loaded with high stacks of music books. They are scanned and processed. The technology that is used is called optical music recognition, i.e. comparable to optical character recognition, in German: text recognition, which makes editable files from scanned paper documents.
With musical notes, this is much more complex than with letters, explains the Enote founder, elements constantly cross each other, there are references up, down, left and right, according to Videnoff. However, the team around its CTO Evgeny Mitichkin managed to build note recognition software that achieves an accuracy of 99.9 percent.
“We buy all available notes,” says the founder, “everything that’s available. But of course they have to be free of rights”. These are musical works whose composers have been dead for 70 years or more. They are considered public property and can be reissued, printed or digitally packed into an app by anyone who wants to.
“In the printed world of sheet music, it’s over 90 percent of the relevant material,” he says with satisfaction. Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven – he just has to pull them all over the scanner.
In the Enote library, musicians can find what was previously difficult to find: “For example, I could say: I need a piece by a French composer who has an anniversary in 2022 and the piece should be for piano solo and no longer than ten Minutes.” That’s what professional musicians are looking for, he explains.
Googling is out of the question, the corresponding metadata is nowhere. So far, colleagues have been called: Can’t you think of something? On his iPad, he demonstrates how his app spits out pieces that meet the criteria in seconds.
As soon as a musician starts to work on these pieces, to rehearse them, the app saves him a lot of time: emphasizing individual voices, marking repeats, crescendo, decrescendo and the pianissimo at the end of the second movement, which must be observed – for one For professional musicians, this type of preparation for a 300-page opera can easily mean a day’s work. Videnoff demonstrates how much of this can be done in seconds on the touchscreen.
Enote can also transpose, transfer a piece to a different key – one click. Hundreds of pages of music are transcribed. And the app comes with useful tools: a tuner and metronome are included. And you can record yourself playing and send the recording to the teacher, for example, who then sends his comments via the app.
Enlarging, reducing, changing the font – all of this sounds simple, says the founder, but it is new for music notation. And of course the fact that you can navigate through a symphony with clicks, jump from movement to movement without having to scroll through it.
Scrolling is a tricky business in musical circles: it is not uncommon for one to scroll back several pages for a repeat in the middle of a piece. A daring maneuver with many risks in a concert, you can scroll through the pages, not finding the right spot so quickly.
Or even worse: One wrong, hectic grip and the sheet music falls off the stand. These dangers are averted with Enote. Once the repetition point is reached, a quick click is all it takes and the beginning of the repetition is displayed on the tablet.
The click, reveals Videnoff, is a temporary solution: In the not too long future, Enote will use a kind of artificial intelligence to monitor the piece and automatically jump back at the end of the repetition.
Actually they are already so far, but before the launch the technology has to be perfect. In general, Boian Videnoff’s benchmark is that everything simply has to be right. Nothing goes below that, as he says.
This is due to his target group: “We musicians, we are like this: all perfectionists.” That’s why technology has to be perfect for musicians, otherwise they wouldn’t accept it.
As with all other start-ups, customer acceptance is also an important topic at Enotes. There are certain caveats. What if the iPad crashes at the concert? What if the battery runs out? Isn’t it better to have a heavy music case that musicians have often carried around with them?
In fact, Videnoff knows from surveys that he and his team have conducted, that 75 percent of professional musicians still use paper sheet music – “but they don’t really like it.” Most people think digital is better, but it still has them no digital solution is convincing.
Videnoff’s idea of digitizing sheet music is not new in itself. However, according to him, the competitors have not yet implemented the project perfectly enough. Enote comes with a freemium model, i.e. a very slimmed-down version is available free of charge in the App Store.
The founder says that 45,000 people have downloaded it since it was launched in early 2021. Enote mainly advertises via social media and Google, but they have just started an influencer campaign, according to Videnoff. He goes on to say that there is a conversion rate of eight percent among app users, so many are switching to the payment option. 92 percent of the users would stay, on average he earns more than 100 euros each.
With these figures in hand, he is currently speaking to potential investors. The European Innovation Council (EIC) already supported Enote with a two million euro grant at the end of 2021 and wants to add six million euros in the upcoming round, according to the founder.
In addition, his start-up has so far been supported by the family office of the lubricant manufacturer Fuchs Petrolub. As a music lover, the company’s patron has invested eight million euros in Enote to date.
Great visions can be spun out of Enote, for example if you think about the use of the app in opera houses and concert halls: “The goal is to create a kind of smart theater in the long term,” says the founder and conductor.
His app would be the digital center, it listens in and knows where the music is in the notes. Not only does it show every musician their voice on the tablet, but the lighting control could also be linked to it. The stage is illuminated fully automatically.
“That would create an unbelievable amount of freedom for the artistic,” says the conductor. Technology that allows more art – that’s exactly what he wants.
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