AirTurn, Inc.

I've been using computers to replace my paper sheet music library now for almost 9 years at this point.  A portion of my existing paper library was digitized using a variety of scanners before coming up with the Opticbook 3600 Plus Book Scanner, which improved the quality of my scans considerably and made the process go much faster.  A major chunk of my digital library came from resources such as CD Sheet Music, which quickly provided large collections of entire genres, such as the entire oevre of Chopin's piano works, the major classical Violin Sonatas and Concerti, and the complete Lieder of Schubert, all for as little as $19.95 per disc.  Over the years, as more and more sheet music became available as downloadable online resources, I've been able to supplement the remainder of my library with both paid and free public domain scores.  You can visit our Resources page for a growing collection of online sheet music vendor and resource links.

In addition to the technological and informational benefits of having all your music in digital formats, there is also the important environmental benefit of working paper-free.  At the time of this writing, I've estimated that my current digital sheet music library is comprised of around 6,000 scores, taking up about 20 GB of space on my computer's hard drive.  My large library comes from the fact that I work as a professional collaborative pianist, specializing in accompaniments for all the orchestral instruments.  I was curious to see what that library represented in terms of the number of trees saved, so I tried applying some of the paper calculations provided by Conservatree.  Assuming that we are using the kraft chemical (freesheet) pulping process to produce copier-paper quality sheets from trees (as opposed to the "mechanical" or "groundwood" process normally used for newsprint and telephone directories, which is twice as efficient for the lower quality paper),

• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree
  1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

Given that my sheet music scores vary pretty wildly in size (anywhere from 4 to 70 pages, depending on the type of work ranging from short solos to major concerti), let's give a conservative rounding of 20 pages per score (given that sonatas are the vast majority of my scores).

• 6,000 scores would yield approximately 120,000 pages of music.
• At 8,333 sheets of copy paper per tree, 120,000 pages comes out to 14.4 trees.

That's the environmental savings just from trees.  What about the impact of printing ink, glues, high quality glossy covers, and even the years of pencils, erasers, and highlighters for marking up the music?  Now let's extend this illustration a bit further beyond a single user.  If a string quartet were to use computers as digital music readers, that could potentially mean a savings of 56 trees.  A 100-piece orchestra would equal 1,400 trees.  A small conservatory like The Curtis Institute of Music with a student population of 168 would equate to a forest savings of 2,352 trees.  A larger school like Juilliard, with 506 undergraduates (not counting their pre-college or graduate students), would represent 7,084 trees.

Even if the per-person library was only half, or even a tenth of my personal collection, you can see how quickly the use of paper sheet music scores becomes a major environmental factor.  So, for all you musicians and music leaners out there, take a second look at that laptop as not only a resource for browsing the web or keeping in touch with your friends, but also for storing and reading your sheet music scores digitally, and as a major tool to reduce your carbon footprint and save 14 trees :)