Scoring Classical Competitions By Laptop

[DudeAsInCool]

Columnist James Barron takes a look at how technology is being increasingly used in judging classical competitions, in his article 'Best Musical Score (By a Laptop)':

Published: June 26, 2004

Being a judge in a student piano competition can be dicey. A judge's decision making can be tainted by any number of things - subjective reactions, or even, one anxiety-laden line of thinking goes, being unlucky enough to play at the beginning of a round and be forgotten by the end. John A. MacBain swooped down on the Second New York Piano Competition yesterday with an answer to all that. His laptop.

It holds a program that he has used to score the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis and the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. Yesterday, in less than an hour in a wood-paneled room at the Manhattan School of Music, where the competition has been going on all week, he turned the numbers on the judges' score sheets into results.

Dr. MacBain is neither a judge nor a pianist, but rather the scoring guru of music contests. This is a sideline - his day job is as a research engineer in Indiana with the Delphi Corporation, the huge automotive parts supplier. He maintains that scoring is fun for someone whose doctorate is in mathematics but less than thrilling for everyone else. "Watching this is like watching grass grow," he declared as he slipped off his suit jacket and switched on the laptop.

Dr. MacBain's system does not involve dropping the highest and lowest scores, the antidote to the old and much-maligned judging system in Olympic figure skating. It does depend on calculating statistical measures like standard deviations, means and medians - something the laptop can toss off like an arpeggio.

You can read his entire article at the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/nyregion...ompetition.html