Legato – Enjoy & reflect your music collaboration

OND Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim
iF Design Award 2022
iF Design Award is one of one of the three most influential design awards which span multiple disciplines and receive submissions from more than 50 nations every year.

Legato is a digital service platform to enhance the music collaboration process for musicians in orchestra settings. Legato collects, analyzes, and reflects data on musicians’ practice through online music collaborations.

Moreover, Legato provides various classical music contents and shares the overall musical process at musicians’ convenience. Besides, Legato examines gaps and maneuvers, musical practice both online and offline, improving performers’ experiences.

Idea

Legato offers solutions to the existing online and offline music collaboration process. It enhances the performers’ experience of online music collaboration. Currently, there are many online musical practices and arrangements. Yet, musicians still rely on various traditional tools, such as writing comments, sound recordings, and video calls to share and exchange views and feedbacks. The tools being used are certainly not the best efficient in the context of musical practice. Legato is a holistic online music collaboration platform to help musicians. It analyzes audio recordings to efficiently archive the performer’s progress.

Form

Legato’s visual design aims to convey the experience to users using a high-tech digital platform while maintaining the atmosphere of traditional classical music. The traditional atmosphere induces the architecture of classical music with the design of visual aspects to convey creative possibilities to users. The design attributes include serif typeface, sophisticated lines, and dark colors. Legato expresses a stable atmosphere using a dark hue as the main color, and the violet color of enigmatic images to provide visual points for depth perception and maturity.

Function

Legato comes with a mobile application and a website to improve accessibility. Users can customize the services by adjust different channels. For example, “Music Diary” provides visualized digital archive of classical music practice data with other performers’ feedback. “Online Communication” provides information on overall performance, music groups, and live and non-live online practice. “Music Library” offers information needed during practice, such as music sheets, video albums, or music history. In the process, a cloud-based musical archive is made through various methods such as text, sound, and feedback sharing, etc.

Differentiation

With the archived sound data, users can exchange feedback on specific parts of the music within the team. This feature allows users to recognize individual weak points and improve through visual reflection. The Music Diary is a visual digital archive that improves users’ practices data through meta-recognition function.

Impact

Legato helps users to overcome the limit of offline music practice and allows collaboration with musicians of various genres consistently beyond space and time. In this sense, Legato aims to realize the possibility of an effective collaboration practice with new technological advances in the classical music domain. I will establish ways for reliable and safe music collaborations in the new normal era of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background

Music industry is rapidly changing with digital innovation(e.g. online streaming services, digital mixing, etc). However, in classical music, collaborative music creation process is still taking place offline on a large scale. Performers are still restricted in time and space, and this requires a new solution to connect and change the offline music collaboration experience with innovative digital tools.

Usually, it is difficult to intuitively check feedback for a particular point of a recording. And it is difficult to archive progress in an individual practice and ensemble session. Typical music archives have been recorded as video or sound data while feedback in progress has been written as text on the music sheet. Thus, it is difficult to identify a clear sound point for each feedback.

The current online collaboration tools are not suitable for music collaboration. Various platforms have been used for music collaboration or practice, such as a Wiki page, text messages, and cloud storage for music scores and contents. This raises the need for an integrated management system suitable for the special needs of musical performers.

Legato System Design

The limitations of offline collaboration in classical music lead to online platforms as their alternatives. Legato overcomes the limitations of time and space in offline music collaborations through different features and provides collaboration with musicians of various genres.

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music – Online Group Collaboration/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021

Online Group Collaboration

The need for online collaboration and live streaming is increasing even more with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Legato, musicians can continuously play and practice with simultaneous video and sound recordings.

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music – Group Collaboration Information/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021

Group Collaboration Information

Legato provides a holistic collaboration experience through a singular platform. Users can share information such as performance dates, coordination of practice schedules, conditions of team members, and rules related to the ensemble. Legato enables these functions through an integrated management.

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music – Simplified Digital Music Score/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021

Simplified Digital Music Score

Users can use a simplified digital music score based on their status. The purpose of the responsive web page was to improve convenience by allowing users to change channels based on their conditions.

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music – Music Library/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music – Music diary/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021

Legato – Digital Service Design for Music/ Copyright © Jiyoung Lee & Hwang Kim 2021