Short Summary

MAIDENS (www.maidens.ro) is a software for assisting composers and music professionals with making better music in less time.

You should care about it if you're a composer in search for new means of expression. You should care about it if you are a film score writer, and have to deliver something close to a symphony in half a month. And you should definitely care about it if your business runs on music or musicians, and their success and productivity, literally, is your profit.

MAIDENS is the brainchild of Claudius Iacob (www.music.ciacob.ro), a licensed musician and a certified programmer. He has a nice portfolio of music compositions you can check out, and a bunch of diplomas and IT certifications.

What We Need & What You Get

Claudius needs 15,000 Euros to cover the expenses of a full year of dedicated development. This will bring the existing beta — which he developed on his personal savings, and can already be downloaded for Windows and Mac OSX — to the feature complete, professional application.

Help funding the application, and you get lifetime discounted (or even free) licenses of commercial MAIDENS modules (yet to be developed), based on your contribution amount. The most generous of the contributors will also receive free assistance with all their music projects, both technically and artistically.

This campaign uses "fixed funding": we only receive the money if the entire sum is covered; otherwise, your contribution returns to you (and you lose any discounts and facilities).

The Impact

MAIDENS is on its way to become the most useful tool, music professionals ever had. If you are in the music business, take this historic opportunity and be part of it. Not only you gain lifetime discounts for MAIDENS modules, but you help change the way the music of tomorrow is written.

What Makes it Unique?

MAIDENS is a music generation software.

Conceptually, its core processes can be reduced to three categories: raw generation, analytics and feedback. First, an elaborate algorithm, produces musical notes. These notes get fed into an analysis routine, which decides how worthy they are. Based on the result, feedback is sent on what was good, and what needs to improve. When analytics decide, that the outcome was, so to say, "acceptable music", that music is returned to the human user.   

Unlike similar software, MAIDENS is built by a genuine composer, who learned to program computers. As a direct consequence, MAIDENS implements essential composition principles, rather than trying to adapt to music, unrelated mathematical patterns. The facts speak for themselves. The music produced by the existing version of MAIDENS, was found by both musicians and non-musicians alike, to be very listenable.
   
MAIDENS is primarily focused on the technically agnostic musician. There are many, fine musicians out there, who master music theory, harmony, polyphony, orchestration, yet, they are unable to find their way in today's music software. This is why MAIDENS requires no other knowledge from the user, than essential musical concepts, such as intervals, note durations, chords, lines, and so on.

MAIDENS is built to be extensible. It comprises a base application, and an arbitrary number of modules. Those can be hooked-up to the base, or one to another. The base provides core functionality, such as displaying, editing, auditioning, and exporting a musical score. The modules are responsible for generating, modifying, and analyzing music. Just plug-in the right modules, in the right place, and you create the right flow for your musical ideas.

All these make MAIDENS a very quick to learn and adopt software, and give it the premises, of a lengthy life.

Risks & Challenges

"I've been making software for the last twelve years, for both small and big firms (such as Adobe) and I can frankly tell you that there is no such thing as a flawless software project. 

It took me no less than five months to bring MAIDENS from an idea to a working beta, while running on nothing but personal savings, and I can tell you this was anything but smooth.

There will always be issues with software development. You discover, late in development, that you can't rely on a given third-party library; or that a feature wasn't well enough thought; or that your requirements changed mid-way. All these happen, and push development behind the schedule.

However, I believe I gathered enough expertise in all these years to work out all of these reasonably well, while striking the right balance between compromise and relentlessness.

There will be inherent schedule flaws. Requirements might inflate mid-way, specifications could break. I'm ready to counterbalance these by self discipline, determination and, most important, transparency: releasing frequently and requesting feed-back often keeps the creepy feature creature at bay." — Claudius Iacob

Other Ways You Can Help

There is very much you can do beside contributing! We will reward you for every bit of interest and awareness you can raise about our project and campaign. Some things you can do right away:

• share a link to this campaign (look for the Indiegogo share tools, so that we can track your help);
• share a link to the project's page (www.maidens.ro);
• download the beta of our software, and play with it! Then give us feed-back or write a cover story on your blog or website;
• bring up the topic in your next pub or party chat;
• include music generated by MAIDENS in your next musical project, and say or write a thing or two about that. Your audience will most likely find it cool;
• just be around — having sympathetic people nearby worths all the money in the world.