eStand - Collaborative Systems for Musicians and Education

Company Information

eStand is the brainchild of David Sitrick who is not only a patent lawyer and inventor, but also a talented guitar player. Sitrick realized that methods for communicating music had not changed in hundreds of years, even though technology had advanced significantly. He developed and patented the eStand concept, a unique and transformative system for viewing, annotating and collaborating with sheet music.

eStand, Inc. was born soon after. The company has been further developing and refining the software as well as developing hardware and systems solutions for musicians. Additionally, it has created groundbreaking new data rights management controls to protect the rights of copyright holders and respect the rights of purchasers and users.

eStand software and the eStand Format document (.eSF file) are poised to become a standard for sharing and collaboratively annotating any kind of digital document.

eStand's Opportunity for the Music Industry

In the 9th Century, Frankish monks - whose intricately woven religious chants had been passed down through the ages with exquisite precision, and without the benefit of a single written note—created 'music notation', a uniform convention for writing and reading music. In a blink of the eye, these monks unwittingly opened the door to the largest and broadest increase in music creation and appreciation the world had ever seen.

Anyone who learned this new, relatively simple system, could not only write their own music, but more importantly publish, preserve and proliferate it and pass it from musician to musician, neighbor to neighbor, church to church, barroom to barroom. We appreciate and replicate this music many centuries and generations later, preserving the creations exactly as they were written and intended.

As these marvelous pages ushered in a new age of performance and publication, they also brought with them a new set of unforeseen limitations. Not only was this music handwritten, tedious, time-consuming, and ultimately expensive to originate and more so to duplicate, but the physical paper itself became an intrusion on the creative process and an economic burden.

While every great advance implies its own limitations, it is not expected that it will take more than a millennium to overcome them. With the computer revolution came an opportunity to be released from these confinements.

eStand™ redefines how musicians obtain, view, and most importantly, work with music. It offers musicians of all calibers a dynamic interaction with the score, making it dramatically easier and more efficient for students and performers to learn new music and perform without hindrances. The result is not only a higher standard and quality of performance, but significant cost savings.

eStand has produced innovative, patented, breakthrough software and hardware for the entire music industry, from the student just beginning lessons to the most accomplished symphony orchestra. Digitized sheet music is displayed on a flat computer screen. Page turning is hands-free and noise-free. Music viewing is enhanced through the high-resolution screen. Vast libraries of music are available via CD-ROM or downloaded from the Internet.

Users range from single performers to full symphonic orchestras with complete synchronization between parts, and include all categories of performers, music librarians, composers, conductors, recording artists, students and teachers.