My friend Shantini Vyas just wrote a post titled "The meaning of UX in a time of AI", and it has many fine points to make.
There have been a half a dozen moments where I've been completely blown away by user experience, where I realized my paradigm completely shifted.
From Playing to Sheet Music
The first such piece would have been in the late-1980s, when I first saw Finale, and saw someone play music on an electric piano and then turn around and print the resulting sheet music on a laser printer.
I'd made pocket money throughout college transcribing music into other keys, e.g., taking pieces written for an instrument in one key, and writing it for an instrument in a different key.
But this, this was the first time I could literally automate that process.
Sadly, Finale's final release was in December 2023, but it had really lost its way given the competition that had sprung up. If you want to watch a truly excellent piece about many of the issues specifically in sheet music notation, I recommend this fantastic hour-ish video from the amazingly entertaining Tentacrul, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music." The first nine minutes are about the history of chess notation.
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