All this week, we’ll be publishing posts from the 2025 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. It’s a huge exhibition, so we’ll focus on what we do best: covering the field of music notation software and related technology. Follow all of our NAMM 2025 coverage at Scoring Notes, and on our social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Whether it’s your first NAMM Show or you’ve been attending for decades, the sheer size of this exhibition is overwhelming, with musical instruments, music education, technology, and gear everywhere you look — and listen.
Martin Keary, the head of software for Muse Group, is in the former category of a first-time attendee. As we began our conversation, he remarked, “It’s so big, isn’t it? I keep seeing people I know, and there’s some party happening here. It’s extremely overwhelming!”
Martin’s journey with MuseScore and his role at Muse Group began in November 2019, initially developing a relationship with the open-source community. He explained, “I had done some designs for them and got to know the internal team. It turned out they needed someone like me. I had always been working on creation software and trying to make it easy for people.”
Martin’s background in composition and experience with 3D programs made him the perfect fit, in his opinion, for MuseScore. He quickly took over the project and became the product owner. “I’ve been working on MuseScore since then, and I’ve started working on Audacity as well. My role is head of software, and we have a fantastic team on MuseScore,” Martin said. “The fact that I have a background in composition, and I studied as a composer — it was the perfect job for me. Absolutely, I’ll never find a job more perfect.”
Although at Scoring Notes we’re mainly interested in music notation software, I did want to learn a little more about what was happening with Audacity, especially since, at NAMM, there is a heavy focus on audio technologies. Specifically, I asked about the differences and similarities between the two projects. Martin noted that when he came on board, “Audacity was a much more insular team, making decisions between ten very skilled and knowledgeable people. They didn’t have the same community as MuseScore. When I came to the Audacity project, there were only two or three hardcore, really good guys” This difference in community engagement has been a significant focus for Martin and his team.
One of the most exciting developments Martin shared was the integration of MuseScore and Audacity. “We’re embarking on the biggest thing we’re ever going to do for Audacity,” he said. “The next version will move over to something called the MuseScore framework. It’s the same architecture that MuseScore uses, and everything we build from this point onwards will be co-sharing with MuseScore.”
This integration will allow for shared components and features between the two programs. Martin explained, “Audacity effects will be usable in MuseScore. We’re already beginning to port things over. We want to build a piano roll that will work in both Audacity and MuseScore, reusing the same components.” Martin hopes that this cross-pollination between the two programs will revolutionize the way users interact with music notation and audio production.
Interactions at NAMM can spark collaboration. “My favorite conversation,” Martin said, “was when a guy came over and he said, ‘You know, if you supported jianpu, the popular solfège notation that beginners use in China — and, like, billions of people use it — it would be absolutely amazing if you could support that.’ And I was like, ‘I’ve got a PR [pull request] for you.’ And I grabbed the PR and I showed him. It’s not finished yet. I showed him like, ‘here’s your notation, press that button, now it’s jianpu.’ And he’s like, ‘oh my God, when this is getting released.’ I don’t think we’ll get it in the next release, but I made a guy’s day.”
There have been a few significant updates to MuseScore over the past year. We’ve seen both playback and notation features and have started to see deeper integration with MuseSounds. Martin’s colleague, Bradley Kunda, has said that MuseScore 4.5 is planned for release at the end of February. He’s also shared a detailed plan not only about future MuseScore development, but also the philosophy at work, and the technical challenges updating MuseScore.
With MuseScore 4.5, there are three main areas of focus: a new percussion system, engraving updates, and features aimed specifically at Finale converts. I asked if that last element was elevated due to the news of MakeMusic sunsetting Finale. “Yeah, absolutely,” Martin said. “It’s this grand old app that has shut down and it’s got lots of people using it. Let’s face it, Finale is particularly different. Finale to any of the other apps is the hardest. I think it’s so fundamentally different. I’ve spent a lot of time with Finale over the last couple of months. It’s just got lots of great little ideas. I mean, it’s been around for 30 years, with infinite features and little optimizations. So we just took some of the paradigms and the ways of thinking, you know, when do you write the pitch? We thought, well, let’s do our versions of that. Not in a conceited way where we’re just going to completely change it and call it the same thing. But the same kind of idea — just slightly tweaked — to accommodate the way MuseScore works, so that it’s not a total nightmare for them coming to this new app.”
Muse Group’s acquisition of Hal Leonard has played a big role in MuseScore development in the past year. “We brought in this big enormous sheet music publisher with all these engravers and we want them to use MuseScore,” Martin said. We want that to be the notation engine that they use to make scores going forward. Of course, they came to us with a list as long as your arm of things we didn’t even think about, and it’s just perfect. It gives us an absolute professional breakdown. We have to have these things. We know, because we do this every day — but to the average user, each one of these little things is just ticking a box for another person, no matter how small. Things like just writing in the name of a chord diagram and then it shows the right chord diagram. That’s an enormous amount of work to get all that working. So that’s been a massive advantage for us.”
Martin likened his approach to design to being pushed by a personal trainer. “I worked with some really, really great UX designers,” he said, “and the thing that I got from them, they sort of go, ‘Just push a little further. You’re almost there. It’s not quite right. Just push a little further.’ And I learned from them that a design will come with an ingenious solution to something, but it’s always a bit too technical. Backwards facing ties or something like that. I’m actually the worst here, because I tend to have to take three or four goes before I get something right. And you think this is going to work and then everyone in the team is just encouraged to criticize and go ‘well, hold on a second. Do we really think a user is going to understand that you press this button over here or that you go over here to find this thing? How can we make it so that they will just know, they will just see it and it will just work?’ Now that’s a holy grail and you don’t always achieve that. But that’s the approach that we take.”
Whatever your approach is to taking in all of the Scoring Notes coverage of NAMM, my complete interview with Martin Keary is here for you to watch on the NYC Music Services YouTube channel.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2025 NAMM Show, and follow us on our social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
