We’ll be publishing coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. The show has events running from January 20-24, 2026, and floor exhibits active from January 22 through January 24. 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 2026 coverage at Scoring Notes.
If you’ve spent any time thinking about where digital sheet music is headed — or wondering why “interactive” scores so often fall short of that promise — then the 2026 NAMM Show had at least one very interesting answer on the floor: Piascore, a company that is ubiquitous in Japan but still flying somewhat under the radar for many musicians elsewhere. Piascore isn’t just another score-reading app, but a platform that has been quietly building many of the things our community has been talking about for years.
I had the opportunity to speak with Hiroyuki Koike, founder and CEO of Piascore, a company that may be less familiar to some Scoring Notes readers but is already a major force in the digital sheet music world. Founded in 2010, Piascore has grown into Japan’s largest digital sheet music platform, with a catalog of more than 300,000 scores and a user base that now extends well beyond Japan. At its core, Piascore began as a tablet-based score reader, but Hiroyuki was quick to emphasize that the company’s ambitions have always gone further than simply replacing PDFs on an iPad.
What distinguishes Piascore is its foundation in MusicXML and structured music data, rather than static page images. This allows scores to behave dynamically: performers can adjust tempo, transpose instantly, loop passages, and synchronize playback directly with notation. During our conversation, Hiroyuki demonstrated how Piascore’s scores are designed to “respond” to the musician, a concept that runs throughout the company’s current product lineup. Performance-following playback, for example, allows the system to track a player in real time, automatically advancing the score and coordinating accompaniment — even enabling effective one-hand practice while preserving musical context.
More recently, Piascore has been leaning heavily into AI-driven features, particularly what it calls AI Coach. In a brief demo on the show floor, Hiroyuki showed how the app listens to a live performance, compares it to the score, and highlights missed or incorrect notes after the fact. Rather than interrupting the player mid-phrase, the system provides gentle, targeted feedback once the passage is complete, offering suggestions for musical and technical improvement. Hiroyuki was careful to frame this not as judgment, but as guidance — an effort to make practice feel more engaging and supportive, especially for students: “For us,” he said, “music always comes first. We believe technology — especially AI — should support musical expression and practice, not replace the musician.”
Another notable component of Piascore’s ecosystem is Music OCR, which converts photos or PDFs of printed sheet music into structured MusicXML data. By digitizing legacy and contemporary repertoire in this way, Piascore enables playback, analysis, and interactivity for scores that were never originally designed for digital use. This approach effectively turns printed music into intelligent data, opening the door to a wide range of interactive features across genres and skill levels.
Throughout our conversation, Hiroyuki returned repeatedly to a central idea: music comes first. While Piascore is actively exploring artificial intelligence, he was candid that the “best” use cases are still emerging. Rather than forcing technology into predefined roles, the company is experimenting, observing how musicians actually use these tools, and refining its approach accordingly. “We don’t think interactive sheet music should just react with pre-programmed answers. It should really listen to the performer and respond in a musical, helpful way,” Hiroyuki said. The goal is not novelty for its own sake, but to remove barriers between musicians and their music — whether that means smoother reading, more effective practice, or new ways of engaging with repertoire.
With a marketplace proven at scale, a rapidly expanding international footprint, and a clear commitment to interactive, data-driven notation, Piascore offers a compelling glimpse into where digital sheet music may be headed.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show.
This sounds like something I would use with students as well as myself.