Cleo Huggins, the designer of the first music font [encore]

Hey, everyone. It's Philip at Scoring Notes. David and I have lots more podcast episodes in store for the future, but today we wanted to share one for the history books. In 2022, we interviewed Cleo Huggins. She designed Sonata, the very first music font ever. It's a fascinating story and Cleo is a fascinating person. It's impossible to imagine today's music notation without music fonts, but it all had to start somewhere. Our conversation with Cleo put us right in the room where it all happened. So if you like music notation software, and let's face it, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably do. Then you'll love this interview with Cleo Huggins. Enjoy everyone, and we'll be back again real soon with another Scoring Notes episode. Welcome back, everybody, to another Scoring Notes podcast where we talk all about music notation, software, and related technology. I'm Philip Rothman, and once again, I'm back with my co-host, David McDonald. Nice to see you, David. How you doing? I'm fantastic. How are you, Philip? Oh, David, I am great. I'm so excited. You know, we talk, David. You and I have talked a lot about fonts on this program. You don't say? Yeah, we've the devil you say. We've mentioned it a few times. Now, David, this is not a quiz, nor is it a trick question. Do you happen to have any idea of how many music fonts there are out there, actually? So music fonts have been around for a little while. I don't know if you're counting some that are currently in active use. I'd say maybe a couple dozen? Oh, boy. Well, we have more than a couple dozen just on notation central alone. We have about 30, and that is really a very small subset. I'm sure of all the music fonts that are in existence. Wow. So there are probably a lot, I don't know, defining a lot, but certainly more than dozens, hundreds, thousands, who knows? But there was a time in our lifetimes where there were no music fonts. And then there was one. And today, we are going to learn a thing or two about that, and a lot more, I imagine, with our very special guest, Cleo Huggins. Cleo, welcome to scoring notes. It is such an honor to have you with us. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. I listened to your podcast with Daniel Spreadbury. It hadn't occurred to me that music fonts were a big deal. So it was pretty exciting. Well, as we alluded to just a second ago, it's pretty much all we talk about around here. So they are very much a big deal. They're very important to what David and I, and I would say all of our listeners and our readers and scoring notes do on a regular basis. So Cleo is responsible folks for the very first music font ever created. And we will talk a lot more about that right after the break. Music type foundry was founded on the belief that each piece of music should look as unique as the person who engraved it. With an eye for artistic and functional detail and a relentless desire to get things done right, music type foundry fonts are inspired by hand engraved scores, with some of the most engaging designs found anywhere. MTF fonts are fully smooth and compliant, so you can use them with ease and switch freely among them in any modern music notation software that supports the smooth standard, like Doriko. Each MTF font is carefully paired with a complimentary text font, along with automatic engraving settings, to draw at the finest characteristics of the typeface. Yet music type foundry fonts exclusively from notation central, and through March 31st, they're on sale for 25% off. Plus, you get an additional 25% off when you purchase two or more MTF fonts in the same order. That's music type foundry fonts exclusively from notation central, music type foundry, beautiful fonts for beautiful music. So, Cleo, is there anything you haven't done? Yeah, I'm working on it. No, there's more. There's more. Yeah. Well, I guess since age seven, I decided I was an artist and went off to Rhode Island School of Design to study graphic design because I actually couldn't decide what I wanted to do. I like math, I like science, I like so many things, but I figured that graphic design was sort of pull it all together. I think it was my junior year. There was a heavy emphasis on typography at the time at RISD in the design department. Chuck Bigelow was a professor there. In the junior year, I ended up going to Germany to work with a company called Unternamens Beratung Rubo Weber. You are W. You are W. Yeah. Because I was excited about what computers could do because my dad was a physicist and he was using them to do for analysis. That was going to be my degree project at RISD, was to design a shell form using three-dimensional programming, which was, I think, Apple 2 at the time. But I saw that you are W was already using, keep explains to describe shapes. So, I wrote them and said I'd love to learn more and then I ended up being an intern out there in the summer. So that got me into the digital type. And then my degree project was pretty miserable. No one understood what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing. I basically did a 3D mapping of a shell and rotated it around and build Budgie's 3D program. And then I had no way to present it. So I had to take a bowl of X and shoot it off the screen. And then I had to, I don't know, it was sort of a disaster. So I kind of left RISD feeling like, man, tail between my legs. I ended up working and teaching graphic design, the Portland School of Art, which is now the main College of Art. But then Chuck Bigelow said he's starting a program with Don Knus out at Stanford. And would I like to be a part of that? Like, hell yeah. So Don Knus was working with Metaphon. He had done tech and Metaphon was his sort of font description language, where the notion of that was that you could describe the shape of a font by describing its path and then switching out a nib. No, it's a really elegant idea. So I went out there and was a bad grad student, you know, just sort of took my time and found Adobe systems. In turn there, they were doing cool stuff and started getting involved with that. Basically kind of put my degree on hold and started working at Adobe. And that's when Sumner Stone was the manager there of the type department. And he knew I played violin and he thought, why don't you do a music font, a font of music notation? It seemed like a really good challenge. So that was kind of how I got into this whole thing. I eventually finished my degree at Stanford. I did a thesis on the design of Egyptian hieroglyphs. So that was a thousand one hundred characters. I'm no stranger to digitizing fonts a lot. Okay. So there was a whole lot in that chronology that I'm very detailed and yet very concise chronology that you just gave us. And you mentioned a few key points that I'd like to just pick up on really quickly before we get to the meat of our conversation, which is about the music type design. You know, you mentioned a few very key people, I think, in the overall development of computer technology. You mentioned Chuck Bigelow. He is one half of the duo Chris Holmes being the other who together created the Lucida type family and also several other fonts for Apple. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. So he was a very key influential person in you're getting into this part of the industry. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. He was definitely a mentor and he was, I think, he won a MacArthur Foundation grant. He had taken an Indian language that had no script and created a script for it. A Native American language. Okay. It's fascinating that we look at these things on our computers all day every day and we don't necessarily understand the history behind them. But the typefaces, like the New York typeface that was so iconic for so long on Macs and some of the other typefaces, the fonts that were used in the early Macs were the result of their work. You know, it's funny. You mentioned the Apple too. I think you said your thesis at RISD was on 3D animation on the Apple too, which a lot of us recall is our first computer, certainly of our generation working on computers and just thinking about what you were already trying to do. Trick out this computer, which for its time, obviously, it seemed powerful, but looking back at what it was and basically trying to do 3D animation on it. How far long did you get with that project? I basically put the coordinates of a shell form into the program and rotated it. And it's like, it's just such a story in my life messing about with technology. Yeah. Just trying to get it to do the thing that you got in your mind. Yeah. It's such a fistfight and you know it's possible, but you're not there yet. Yeah. You spend so many hours working on it and put so much energy into it and you show it to someone and they're like, you made a picture on its green. Yeah. Right. You lose context. You lose context of what you're, you see it from their point of view and they're like, what? Right. So yeah. And then you talked about your W. I think they are now part of monotype, but there's a history there with Hermann Zoff, who many of us may know as the designer of Palatino, Optima and a lot of these fonts later were incorporated into some of the core post script fonts and you mentioned post script. So there is an intersection with some of these key players as well. Yeah. You are W. They were a computer consulting company. Okay. And they were doing, they ended up getting a gig doing signage for some large scale project. And they decided that if they could just outline the letters with a sign, they could mill it out with a mill, big milling machine or big milling cutter. And at some point they made the leap to translating that into generating little font strips that were used in type setting machines. So they would describe the shapes of the fonts with their same cubic spline algorithms that they were using in their big signage system. And so that's how they kind of got backed into the font business. And Peter Kara was the guy behind all that or one of the big players in that. I think a lot of the people around that time were interested in the, as they became more interested in the fonts, Hermann Zoff was definitely the classic guy. And he's like a pre-computer type designer, right? Yeah. He's definitely I'd forget back how long ago he started. I mean, he was classic, but he would embrace the technology. I took a class from him when I was in art school up at Rochester. He taught computer font or computer design, you know, and it was him standing there with no computers, none of us had computers, talking about how computers work. You know, he would say, you have the possibility to do this, and you have the possibility to do that, and you have this possibility to do that. He was incredible, but he was really current. So he always was somebody people went to who were into technology. And that would have been in, I guess, the late 70s? That would have been early 80s that that class was at RIT. Early 80s. Yeah. So yeah, he really transcended the development of fonts really from basically pre-war all the way through the technology and be able to talk about it at that theoretical level, understand without even having a computer in front of you and to be able to talk about the theory behind it. And as someone who only really at the very surface level understands this, you know, you mentioned something about URW, taking the outline of these type forms. In my mind, that is the key element in getting from there to Adobe and the development of the post script technology and the way to define these characters as paths that they encompass and using vector definitions as opposed to bit mapping the fonts and basically post script. I'm way over simplifying this, but post script is more or less a way of the computer telling the printer how to draw something at a vector based level. And then the printer will interpret that and print it out at whatever resolution that printer is capable of, which is ultimately going to be a bit map result. But that was the secret sauce. That's what Adobe, you know, 1984, a seminal year in so many ways for computer technology had developed post script level one technology. You nailed it. It's exactly that. It was to separate to free the fonts from the resolution that BitNaps would always sort of curse them to live in. That was what was so brilliant about it. Liz Bond was the marketing director at Adobe at the time and she was the one I first worked for as an intern. I actually had to sit in with the meeting with Steve Jobs to decide what those 14 fonts were going to be. And she told me not to say anything. And I didn't know it was Steve Jobs. And I started, I guess I got into a bit of an argument with him. He was talking about wanting like fonts like gorilla or machine on there. Liz wanted me to stick to the program and get ITC fonts. So yeah, it was awkward. She kicked me under the table. It's like, oh, that must be Steve. Wow. So that was the first set was she wanted a selection of classic fonts. Palatino was one of them. I think schoolbook and your name. Yeah. He really played an important role in getting like we said 1984 the year that the Mac was introduced and not coincidentally or maybe coincidentally, but the two paths, if you will, converged that Adobe was working on this. And then the Mac was being released and there was a real opportunity to get this on to the laser writer and other post script enabled printers with the technology was so new at that time. It just kind of blows my mind that you were being kicked under the table and meeting with Steve Jobs, deciding how all these things were going to go. And it was also fun as new printer technologies came along like we were using a laser printer. And that was, I don't know, maybe 300 dots branch. Sure. And it was just so exciting to see things look good. And then line a type. Then we had post script on line of types. And now we're actually using a type setting machine and seeing the same stuff come out on line of type. It was like, wow. Yeah. Just kept getting better. Because let's remember what preceded the laser printer. That matrix. Yeah. It was the dot matrix printer. Yeah. Yeah. Which to be fair is what all those bitmap fonts were designed for. Sure. And that's why this other stuff would often look so ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It's because it was designed for the opposite way of thinking about an image. Just to kind of remember what we're talking about here. And we're jumping ahead slightly. But I spoke with Ben Finn, who clear you may know was one of the co-founders of Sibelius, which was one of the programs that we talked about on this program and awful lot. And laser writers and laser printers were so new at that time and expensive. They designed Sibelius. They designed the whole program without even printing out a sheet of music. And then right before they were going to release the product for the first time, they said, you know, we should actually test this out and print out what we're trying to do here and see if it works. And it was like a moment of high drama when they rented a printer for a day or a couple days and actually tested if everything that they saw on screen, which of course was very pixelated and not nearly as refined as something you would get even from a 300 DPI laser printer. And they printed it out. And it did actually, in fact, do what they expected it to do. And it was very exciting. But that's how new the technology was even at that point. Yeah. Okay. So after your studies and doing some other things, you came to work at Adobe for the reasons that were previously just stated. It stands to reason that that was the right place at the right time for the project that we're talking about, which is the development of a music font. But do I have this correct? So Sonata, that wasn't just Adobe's first original music font. Is it right that that was actually their first original font period? Yeah. It doesn't get mentioned because it's not an alphabetic font, but that would be their first original font. Wow. Wow. So some or stone sort of decided that we would do some in-house fonts, kind of like the old foundries would have type designers. We wanted to bring back that notion in the digital world. So various people in our group, Carol Twombley, Robert Slimbach, Fred Brady, they were all doing a lot of research and working on fonts. But I think this just came out first because I was done with it. And yeah, technically it's the first original. And did you actively seek out this assignment or was it, like you said, they said, Oh, you play violin. You know how to read music. Why don't you do this, Cleo? Yeah, I think Sumner was sort of looking around to see if any of us wanted to be part of this, you know, to develop something. And it was just his suggestion. And I totally jumped on it because I had played music and it just seemed like a really, really interesting project. And the more I got into it, the more interesting it got. I'm sure. Why was Adobe interested in a music font at that time? I can't tell you except that this Sumner thought printers were coming out and there was a need. I mean, I have to give him credit. I think he kind of put that together. But it was kind of the right time. We were looking at everything printable, you know, suddenly everything's a nail when we've got a laser writer. So we're looking for situations. My colleague Lynn Guerrell worked on a map font. So she was looking at the symbols that are used in cartography. So we're kind of looking for where are these areas where printing, where having a high quality font would make a difference. Right. Right. Because like you were saying, even if you were using other symbols, it probably would have been hard to use vectors in that same way to create that really high quality image using kind of a bespoke image for each thing. But if you had a font that had a collection of glyphs in it that you could scale and rotate and do things with and look nice on the laser writer or whatever, that's fascinating. Do you remember what other kinds of non-alphabetic fonts they were working on? I was working on a lot of the non-roman fonts because I seem to be drawn to that. We were producing sort of standard fonts, converting them basically into postcode. So there was a Hebrew font. I was working on an Arabic font and then I had my own project with the hieroglyphs. We hired Musumi Abe. He was working on Japanese fonts and Chinese fonts. Yeah, we tend to forget that these fonts that we see in the drop-down list in our favorite application, most of them have a history that goes way before way prior to any computer technology. These were all based, like you said, on actual traditional typefaces and then digitized at a later point. So paint us a picture, clear, if you would, you're coming at this from your experience, obviously your education, Brisbane, Rhode Island School of Design, very, very fine school, of course, for this sort of work. And then Rochester RIT and having some years under your belt doing related work with URW and so on. Now the assignment comes to create Sonata or maybe it wasn't called Sonata at the time. Do you know actually know how that name came about? Yeah, I named it. I mean, I didn't actually like Sonata. It wasn't my first choice. I wanted it to be, I think I wanted Allegro. But then I looked up there as like RV campers named Allegro and I'm like, nah, that's not going to work. Sonata was my second choice, but there was a piece of music by Bach that we used as our demo sheet and it was Sonata, so it kind of all worked out. Right. So I mean, where do you start? How did you start? There's so many different components. There's like, what are the character shapes? You know, what do they look like? Are they beautiful? Are they ugly? What's out there? So I did a lot of research on trying to see what the existing printing houses produced and, you know, the variations of them. So there's looking at the dial of it. There's looking at the character sets. Well, first of all, I had to figure out how is music printing being done? And at that time, there were major printing houses, take scores and print them. Sure. But there were a lot of stuff just got sent to Korea and that was how it was produced. Korean stamping was the state of the art. Yeah, it was. Yeah, at that time. And then for the person just trying to do it themselves, there was no to set. I didn't realize that was a collector's item. Yeah. Daniel spreadberry's tried to find it on eBay and has had no success. I know. I've got a few sheets, Dan. But so it was like trying to figure out what aspect of this was a font. Because one of the first piece of the music I looked at was Locke's handwritten music. Sure. And I thought, you know what? That's the way it should be. It's so beautiful. You look at it and you can almost hear it. But no, we've had to chunk it into font pieces and they were either metal, you know, type setting or whatever. Sure. I mean, that seems to be the thing. You start out with beautiful calligraphic things, then you have to regularize it so it gets drawn into punches and set. And there's a rigidity to it. But the kind of cool thing is computers could also defy that, which is where it gets fun. Looking into the existing character sets, some of them weren't really relevant for computer like some of them music typewriter had half a glyph above and half a glyph below so that you could create them together. So sort of distilling out what's in the character set, what is font like about music? One of the biggest issues was placement because with the regular font characters, you can miss space something and you might, instead of the word quart, you might see q-art. But if you misplace music, you know, that's like a noticeable faux pas on an orchestra. You can't misplace a note because it has a different meaning. So placement was like my biggest, like I got to do this right. It's interesting to me the parallels and the differences between creating text fonts and creating music fonts. Like the parallels you mentioned just a second ago, like it flows from handwriting at a certain point. The printing press evolved and soon thereafter, music printing evolved. But for a while, for a long while, people were handwriting or hand carving text. And then the same with music, it was being handwritten for so long. And then there were calligraphers that were formalizing it to a certain extent, but still by hand. And then, as you said, then comes the punches and the engravings and rigidly carving these things up into categories and uppercase and lowercase perhaps and all the rest of it. And then finding the computer to kind of maybe introduce that human element back into the process. That is more or less similar in the way that text fonts are created in music fonts. But then clear, there's a real difference that you just mentioned. And it has to do with spacing and the organization of the elements on the page. Because as you said, you could really severely mess up type setting text, ordinary text. You can miss spell things. You could paginate it weirdly. You could do a whole lot of things. And yet, it would still be readable. And someone would be able to understand it. You do that with music. If you space it incorrectly, if you don't align the systems up correctly, if you miss spell something. And so I mean, you know, where I'm going with this. Like you said, one error could be catastrophic in a performance context and several errors or several dozen or several hundred errors along the lines that we're talking about really would render music totally illegible. So how did you approach that particular problem? So in fonts, there's a notion of an M quad, which is the unit of space that sort of sums up the height and width of all the characters. I created the staff as that. And the zero zero coordinate on that staff fell in the center of the bottom line. The point was to reduce any errors that a programmer might have to guess or round up or round down. Okay. Because those rounding errors would cause a note to not land in the right space. So everything would fall exactly as it would on the staff. So in the center of a line or in the center of a space. And then the note heads, the next placement of a character, like the width of that character might be exactly where the stem would end so that you could place a flag exactly at that coordinate. Okay. You wouldn't have to guess. So I mean, Adobe was good about this thing they did hinting to keep line weights equals throughout. Can you describe hinting briefly? So if you have the notion of a line thickness and you're printing it out on a lower resolution printer, you've got the stem of a letter B and you've got two of those in a row. It may just happen to fall a little bit off the grid. So you might it might take one and a half, which equals two at a lower resolution. So one character would have a one pixel width stem and the other one might end up with two. Well, that makes the font look really blotchy. So they invented this thing, which is really high secret. We couldn't talk about it and couldn't get drunk and tell anyone. You could get drunk, but you couldn't tell. Yeah, but that was the next thing. It was like, go home and you couldn't spill the bean. So it would lock in. It would say, okay, we're going to lock at this resolution for a printer. And they called it hints. So that was sort of built into Postgrip to manage that. And I can see it on some music applications where the staff line might be a little sick in one spot and then thin again in the other. So those are that was just like Adobe's sort of secret sauce. Okay. I want to talk about the release and really it has to do with where you draw the line, if you will, pardon the button, between what the fonts responsibilities are or how much weight the font can carry. Sorry, I guess there's another unintended button there. And how much is the responsibility of the prospective program that didn't even exist at that point. I mean, you were basically creating the font with the hopes that these programs would then use it. Where did you decide was it based on a limitation of what could be done in a font at that time? For example, you know, obviously note heads and things like accidentals, flats and sharps and things like that. Those were drawn by the font. But then we're talking about things like slurs, things like bar lines, staff lines. So then we're talking about, okay, what about flags and what about the stem that connects the flag to the note? Is that the font? Is that the program? How did you how did you approach that quandary? There were some things that were clearly outside of the font world like the slurs dynamics and the beams. But there were other things that could be built up from font pieces. So it was sort of how much is a piece like an individual flag or the 16th flag to they crossover that's obviously one piece because it's a design and making them easy to use to build with would kind of give you that dynamic aspect like the rests which stack up, but they stack up at an angle. So the position point of where your cursor is left after you set that character, lined up exactly to set the next rest without messing up. So there's sort of this weird state where there's component pieces that can build up a font. There's actual font characters, you know, like an eighth note or some of the symbols like the piano, pianissimo, things like that. But the most outside the boxings were the slurs, the dynamics and that. The weird one about the slurs was that seemed pretty straightforward, you know, starts at a little point, gets thicker, ends at another point, and then you just tell at the beginning and the end and the program, the programmer would draw that. But it wasn't until we printed the piece that Glenn had created out on the line of type that we realized those slurs came to such a razor sharp point because infinitely small point, it just didn't look right. So it's like we had to sort of advise people to round them off because they're going to look like little needles because the program has a capacity to go to an infinitely small point. That's interesting. So they were used to drawing it as an infinitely small point in the way they described it in the computer because they knew that the printer was going to, never going to look right. No, but off anyway. Yeah. And now finally, the printer can do that and it's doing what they really were telling it to do the whole time and it looks ridiculous. It looks ridiculous. Your eye just goes right to it. It's like, oh, what a great story. Yeah, you would never have a pen at that infinite size. Right. It was always going to be some sort of width to it. And then, you know, you talked about between the program and the font and you mentioned other ways in which music was being produced at that time, whether it's Korean stamping or whether it was the noticet or whether it was the music writer and the music writer actually famously was, except for slurs, except for that was kind of the one hang up that it couldn't produce. But you could start with a blank sheet of paper and drop it into your music writer and it was producing not just what we would think of as font elements, but the staff lines and the bar lines and all of that. And I don't know. I mean, I'm sure David, you and I played a lot of music that was prepared on music writers. I certainly recall it at that time. Scoring Express is a collection of professional templates for Sibelius Indorico, based on the same templates used at NYC Music Services. Each Scoring Express package is much more than just the templates. It contains high quality music and text fonts, manuscript papers, and house styles. The settings and Scoring Express files are the result of decades of experience producing music at the highest level, meticulously calibrated to get great results every time. There are suites for chamber music, jazz, theater and studio, and the new choral and vocal suite, perfect for songs, choral anthems, and hymnals, with publisher-level quality results right away. Get started using Scoring Express today at ScoringExpress.com. Make your music look as good as it sounds. So, okay, before we even get to the release of the launch of this font, so you had to study all these elements, how did you ultimately decide on the design, because you said clear there are so many elements to making these choices? How did you decide what was the right look? That was a good question. I wanted it to be really elegant. So, my training font design, I have all these designers in my life of typography people that are really high standards, so it's always shoot for the moon, right? And notice that was like the solid. Well, in order to digitize any character, you have to draw it at a larger size so that you can get the points in more accurately. Then you reduce them down, but notice that, so if I blew them up a bit to see, okay, how's this letter going to look? It's all fuzzy. They're really clunky. A lot of it was cleaning them out, you know, just like redesigning it. But then they all had to work together as a set. I mean, the only exception is like the dynamics of Pienissimo and Fortissimo. There's such a classic look to those that I felt like I can't introduce another style here, because these are iconic people read music in real time. They don't want to. Is that a P? They are stylized already. Yeah, you got a stick with stuff that people know, because you're just going to handicap them. So really, my only playground was can I make the G-cluff really elegant, not falling on its face, not spindly, and the flags. I didn't like the flags. I don't like clunky wine glasses. And I took my favorite wine glass, turned it upside down and said, that's the flag. If you look at the flags, look for the wine glasses. Oh, yeah, sure. I can see it. Yeah. So it was trying to unify the set, trying to get as elegant as I could possibly imagine. Yeah. And then leave the other stuff that's classic the same. What were the tools that you use? Did you have a GUI, a GUI tool for designing the characters, or did you do this all directly in post script, or how did that work? We had a digitizer at a Joby, but most of our fonts were not built from scratch. Okay. So it was a really old, I mean, they had an awkward digitizer where you could put the points in. And I've spent a lot of time putting points around curves and tangents. And I mean, I got to the point where I'd be driving home late at night and I put points along the road and smooth them out and curve fit the road. And I could do it in my sleep. So it was just like a one off to digitize the shape. So like the G-cluff and the randomy shapes. But the other ones like the ellipses, I think I sent you a photograph of all the ellipse studies we did. You know, like let's try this thickness, that ratio, this angle. Is it 27 degrees? Is it 25 degrees? What's got that sweet spot? So a lot of those are just algorithmic, because those shapes can be built pretty easily from standard shapes. Right. And these are basically the same basic building blocks that a font designer might use to draw a zero or an O or something like that. I mean, for fonts, there's so many little subtle things that happen that you're probably, it's more like what people would use now to put an infant studio or Adobe Illustrator. You know, you're putting a point down and you're stretching it out and you're adjusting the splines. But some of the characters in the music font could be described as an ellipse or a V shape. And so some of them were just generated with post grip. At the end of the day, they're all post grip shapes. I mean, they're all vectors. Right. Getting them in there was there was an old process that we didn't really use at Adobe, but it was enough to get by. So it's one thing for it to look elegant to you. And maybe you're a wine drinker and you like the shape of that wine glass. David's a whiskey drinker. Maybe he likes a whiskey glass. But what am I getting at here? Of course, people are going to have opinions. And I would imagine that you actually wanted to solicit those opinions and get feedback. Yeah, I had a big questionnaire. Actually, as I was researching, I kept finding new people and, you know, music copyists, people who were developing programs themselves, different researchers and musicians. And I ended up cultivating quite a group of people that I would offer the font, send it out. I would send out a proof sheet. I got awesome feedback from people. There's this guy, Tony Fino. I think he was a music copyist. Music copyist, arranger, orchestrator. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And he just kept sending me. Do this. Do that. And Don Bird was amazing. And I was so fortunate that people were just excited. They're like, yeah, oh, do this, do this. Don Bird produced Nightingale, which was one of the early music notation software applications. Yeah. Yeah. So you were in touch with your colleagues in the industry at that point. And you were starting to say, okay, here's prototype. I don't know how you name them. Prototype one, two version, whatever beta one, two, three, four, and sending it. And I imagine at that point, it was the 80s, you could communicate to a certain extent, but certainly not with maybe the same way we could email and upload attachments and collaborate in real time. It was very much like, hey, I'm going to type literally on a typewriter, type out a letter or maybe a word processor, stick it in the mail. And somebody would open up that a few days later and handwrite their comments and mail it back to you. Yeah. Somebody said they were going to FedEx me something. Wow. Yeah. It was all done with, I mean, we had email, because universities had it, but, but not where you could drop in an attachment or do anything like that. So yeah, it was all letters. And I have a notebook that's like eight inches thick of all the correspondence. And I can't believe I was that organized in my 20s. I don't know what happened. I believe it because there's no other way that someone who wasn't organized could have produced something that has stood the test of time for so long. And you shared with us prior to us recording here. Well, one of those bits of correspondence and it probably was representative of the types of questions that you asked. One of them was asked, the first question is, is it complete of the character set? And does it contain enough characters to actually be a usable font? I mean, you're getting at the heart of it right there. What were some of the responses that you got to that? And some of the other questions you asked, like, even the weights of the characters, are they correct? Are they too heavy? Are they too, are they too light? Do the sizes relate to each other? Did people have differing opinions? How did you resolve the different types of feedback that you got and ultimately come to a decision? I don't really think there was a lot of conflicting. It was more a matter of who paid the most attention to what aspect of it. Like Don Byrd might say, oh, at the trouble cleft, those little dots are too small. Well, Tony may not have picked up on that, and have another comment. So, everything really dovetailed. I didn't feel like, you know, I've got to resolve these two different points of view. I think the biggest thing was people were like, oh, we need more, you know, can you do a sonatina, the next one for the music copyists or for music historians? And man, I wanted to. I still want to. Sure. Thinking back on developing this font, what was the biggest challenge that you ran into? The biggest sort of freak show was when I was I was working with Jeff Brown on Deluxe Music Construction set. And at one point, he said, you know, Cleo, I need backward-facing notes because I'm building these clusters. And I'm like, no, you don't. You know, it's built-in. You can just back up here in Bolivan. I wrote them a little thing saying how to do it. I don't know if you really focused on that because it was launch time. So, he was really preoccupied with other things. But he said, no, I really need those, you know. And and Adobe said, Cleo, we really need someone to have an application when the music font release is just give them the backward notes. So I like put the backward notes in. I thought, you know what? I'm creating a standard. I knew that. I knew that at the time that I was whatever I was doing could be a standard. And those notes were going to be in there. And I would hate it. And they are, and I do. Yeah. Because later, Jeff said, oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. I could have done that. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So once you actually got that feedback and you kind of settled on the version, then whatever was the final version of Sonata, I suppose, then it came time to decide on the standard. And that's something that you just said a moment ago, which was that you realized that you had to design not only the font and the shapes and how they would interact with the software, but how are these going to be mapped onto our conventional query keyboard? Yeah. And I know that programs really didn't need to worry about that because those are stored in a program. And they can be picked up and you never have to interact with a keyboard if you're designing a music notation system that might have drag and drop or whatever or even convert MIDI to printed. So I figured the worst case was the person who had to sit at a keyboard because at that time, that was pretty much all people could use was like my draw, my right. I don't even know if Illustrator was up. So it was mostly the worst case with people at a keyboard. I had also with my Egyptian Hyroglip font. There were so many characters. I just put them numerically across the key, you know, starting with the ASCII character set all the way down. But it meant there was some you couldn't really reach through any of these word processing programs because they were on characters that didn't have a corresponding key. So I really wanted to make sure it worked on the keyboard. And then it was just a matter of, okay, what works, you know, there's sort of a visual representation. And then there's try to come up with a system that's consistent. So if shift moves you up in speed, like a 16th note, then keep it that way for all of them. So I don't even remember what the keyboard set is now. But at the time, it was somewhat logical. But you know, and again, it's now it's probably cast in stone, which is too bad. And you mentioned that this was all stuff that you needed to think about because you just needed to put each of these symbols in a space. But that the software was going to be the thing that really had to deal with this. And regular users weren't going to that's something else that you mentioned. And this was I'm sure a really important thing for Adobe. If this font was going to exist, nobody was going to be able to use it. Unless there was some software that understood the font table and how to assign things and put them in and lay out a whole score. I know you were working in some way to create this box demo page that you mentioned earlier. How was that created? And then how did that lead to working with the first notation applications that used this font? One of the biggest challenges was we didn't have anybody to print out samples because there was no music application. The great program I worked with at Adobe who I owe so much to Glenn Reed, he laboriously wrote a program to show the font. He wrote Postgrip to describe the sonata to example of Bach, that Bach piece that we would send out. So the biggest wow was when we finally saw that printed on the line of type, like, this is good. This is going to work. We definitely needed something in house because just even to print, I wouldn't be as bold as the person who waited till the very end and rented a laser rider to see how it looked. I couldn't do that. But anyway, in house, everything was done in Postgrip, you know, move to line two, our line two. And I could put a staff out and drop characters and they kind of get a sense, but you really didn't know how it looked in music. So Glenn did the whole program behind it. I wish I had the, I might have it somewhere, probably on a floppy of his program that produced that whole sonata thing that we used. So it was one program that's only job was to interpret your font symbols and display them as this page of Bach. I love that. Yeah, it was, you know, Postgrip's a page description language. So it was the code behind that page. But the music, it was like the kind of race at the time, there were a number of applications being developed that said that they would work with sonata or excited about working with sonata. I mean, there was Deluxe Music Construction set. He seemed to be the closest to being done. And Adobe was always asking me, can you find someone who's going to use the font high score by Kim Stickney, who's no longer with us, professional composer, night and gale, music crafters, and I think personal composer. These are the ones that were, they're all there, but they weren't going to be released right away, but we wanted to get the font out. I think Jeff was the closest. He was in Mountain View. So he and I had the most correspondence, but I didn't really see a lot of stuff from him until he was ready to go, you know, how it is. We're talking about Deluxe Music Construction set, electronic arts. Yeah, electronic arts. Right. He was the one that you were most in touch with leading up to the release of this product. Yeah. Having his program out there at the same time that sonata was released, was a big win in Adobe's eyes. I see. That was a watershed year 1986, which was when the font was released and DCMS was released as well. Yeah. It was all closed. Most of people were right there in 87, for sure. Yeah. There's a very interesting article that you sent us from something called the magazine from December 1986. The reviewer is a man by the name of George Litturst. He reviews basically your font. He calls it the music product of the year, and he mentions you by name to thank you for creating the font, but he illustrates the fundamental conundrum in a way that I think could have been written yesterday. Then he talks about the problem of basically creating music on a computer because he says, quote, it's best illustrated by the diverse reactions from professional musicians. The problem with when I show the music software, one musician says, that's incredible. I'll buy it today. But another will say it can't do x, y, and z. Obviously computers aren't all they're correct up to be. No notation program does anything right. Whichever one I use, there are several problems. They won't do certain rhythms correctly. They won't support certain time signatures or key signatures. Some of the music symbols aren't drawn correctly. Often the spacing is bad. I can't reposition symbols. I found workarounds, such as editors and graphics programs, and if even reconseed the notation of my score, but the time and effort involved is prohibitive. David, I mean, that would describe, I mean, that could be a comment on our review of Dorko 4. And not to disparage that program, it could be a comment on any of the versions of any of the products we've covered over the decade we've been doing this on scoring notes. So there's the issue, right? Like you said, Cleo, you wish you could have developed sanatina and build this out even further. I mean, he George described that issue and yet was so enthusiastic because of what a quantum leap, the combination really of sonata and the use of the font in the products was, you know, it's interesting. He went on to predict a couple things. And you know, like you said, you had developed this font, you created the standard. And he predicted three things in this article. He said one that nearly every music program would support it, which it did, at least for a time, two developers would incorporate a full range of the fonts characters. And three, there would be pressure to bring other notational features of the programs up to par. And it strikes me that much of that happened. I think the one development that emerged fairly quickly was that each application, and now we're starting to talk about finale and subalias and kind of get into the present day. They started off using sanata or at least finale did, but then they very quickly, I think, realized that in order for them to have the degree of control that they needed to produce software that they had basically the full range of oversight over, they needed to actually create their own fonts for use within the program because sonata as beautiful as it was. And it still is much more beautiful than some of the early fonts that were created, you know, directly by those software companies, because it was, you know, it was created by you, a type designer. And patrucci, the first font and finale was very famously not created by a type design of professional, but that was thrown together pretty quickly. And the story is up on finale's make music website by his own admission. Steve Pella. Steve Pella. Yes, thank you. Yep. I met him in a workshop and he goes, are you Cleo Huggins? Did you design sonata? And he's like, oh my god, I can't believe it. You know, I worked on this font. I had no time. I had to dash it out. I was in awe of what you did, but I couldn't, you know, it was, it was awesome. Yeah. So that ultimately became the way that the software developers went until fairly recently with smooth. Well, that is basically they realized that they needed to not just create the core font, but they needed other fonts and that's ultimately the way they went. But patrucci was really a poor substitute for sonata in terms of its design. And yet it was the solution to the problems that finale was encountering. Talk about this. And you met Steve, were you aware of that and how what they were coming up with? I wasn't at the time. I mean, I only met him like two years ago. I didn't even meet him. You know, you can call online course or something. We were both doing a just Godine class. Okay. No kidding. Yeah, it was wild. But I was so tunnel vision on sonata and I was working at Adobe. And then I then I went off and worked at Apple and moved on in a way. Okay. But at the time, it was frustrating, but totally logical. Yeah. That they need control. Yeah. If the font lives in there, then they can add the different things and they can fine tune it better. All I can hope is that if I raise the bar, then people have to at least make the font look nice. So that's all, you know. Yeah. Well, a lot of the decisions that you made, probably both in terms of the way the font was conceived at a structural level and defining those elements that you talked about a little while ago, the zero point and the way the glyph sets on the line and all these other technical elements that forgive me. I'm maybe not getting quite right. Those were built upon in the design of these other music fonts, as well as a like, okay, yeah, we're going to keep the idea that the ampersand is the G clef and the question mark is the base clef and shift this to produce a certain rest that are increased the magnitude or decrease the magnitude, I guess, depending on how you want to look at it and so on and so forth. And what ultimately happened was that was kind of a de facto standard in our world for such a long time. It still is for some of the fonts that use that system certainly in Sibelius, the Opus font and all the fonts that rely on that standard, if you want to call it that, still basically can trace their lineage to the way that you set it up in the first place. And a lot of the what we would call legacy fonts, certainly the legacy fonts in finale, whether they be Maestro or Engraver or the jazz font, which was licensed by make music for use in its program and all the handwriting fonts, they all needed to adhere to that standard in some way, shape, or form. And then people had to find basically the workarounds that were describing that article to get at other solutions. Before we get to the present day of where this has gotten us, you worked on Sonata, you got it out there and it was a really important, I would say, groundbreaking and essential achievement in the development of music notation software. But let's just spend a moment because I'm very interested to learn where your career went from there because it went in a very different direction. Yeah. In some ways, I went off to work at Apple in the online services group and it kind of has a parallel because it was like yet another unknown universe opening up online services. They had American online, but they wanted to redo their own thing. So my contribution there was to work it out as eWorld. Okay. I came up with that metaphor and just to kind of make it easier for people to sort of understand online communication, which was new at the time, you know, you had email, but a chat, all these different things, online shopping, stuff that was coming along. I think that the exploratory stuff is the common thread, but definitely different universes. You're talking more or less like a portal into which people can access the internet. Yeah. There wasn't an internet. Was there really? No, not really. Not quite yet. I mean, there was, not a web though. Yeah. Not a worldwide web. Yeah. There wasn't a web. Yes. Right. I heard that there was a thing called mosaic. Mm hmm. I had to pay attention to. Wow. And then from there. From there, I sort of went off with a partner of mine. We went around the world on an infield motorcycle for two years, traveling with our laptops and doing work with non-government organizations, taking photos and doing, you know, hand coded websites to show what they do to help them with advocacy, then bicycling around Indonesia, doing stuff there and then Africa doing work with NGOs, with pastoralism and land right issues and it was fun and, you know, I don't know how much it, but we really ended up doing, except learning a lot and being exposed. Yeah. And then, you know, mostly 10 years here in New Hampshire, I worked in an IT company in New Jersey, just kind of doing whatever they needed. Mm hmm. And now I'm back kind of working on the pastoralist stuff. I've been Sudan trying to do advocacy for that and raising oysters because we live by the water. It's incredible. That's quite a combination of way to spend your time. Oh my gosh. I mean, we're talking about a lifelong curiosity and propensity to do good in the world and whatever form it takes. It's very admirable and remarkable. Oh, thanks. So congratulations on not getting sucked in to music fonts your entire life. But I'm curious actually. So you did say that you did meet Steve Paola through, you know, another way. So what extent, if at all, had you kept up with the development in that particular world, music fonts or music notation software in general? Not really. None. Yeah. I've always wanted to return to it because I knew that it just seemed so like, okay, that was the first pancake, you know, full of grease, you know, a little bit overdone. Let's, let's do it again. And I love the idea of the smooth fall. I feel like, wow, wouldn't it be fun now to come back and just do, I'm not afraid of a thousand one hundred characters because of the higher glyphs. So why not do another one? You know, I think there are three thousand in counting and smooth fall. So nothing, that's nothing. I'm sure you'd be welcome with open arms if you were to ever return in a heartbeat. And I was going to say, I'm sure you've got some really specific ideas. Like you said, you know, if you think of Sonata as the first pancake, you have some really specific ideas about what you tried differently in a second pass. Yeah. And like you said, Cleo, even though it wasn't that specific standard, you did envision that there would be a need for more than the initial character set that you created in Sonata. And that's what smooth fall accomplished. I mean, it might be fun to just sort of explore, like, look at box handwritten notation. I mean, if you're reading that in real time in an orchestra, you're probably not going to get through much. It might be hard to read. But if you're an almost artistically, wouldn't it be fun to take MIDI and produce like a corresponding typeface that expresses the music dynamically? That's like its own handwriting based on the music. I don't know. That sounds great. I like that really creative expression of what a font could do. Like it's not just to do things that we can already do in other ways, but that it could be used to do something that that we don't have a great analog of. This is kind of semi analogy here. But one of the projects that you did after you, I think it's after you were working on fonts was this paint application that came in a paint can. And folks, you got to go online and see what this is, because you were trying to think in a different way about how software was distributed. And instead of these boring floppy disks, you actually solved a lot of problems and made it a cool marketing piece as well. Yeah, I had my own company with my partner Hal, Hal Rucker. It was Rucker Huggins. And that was one of our first projects. There are two really geeky guys that had invented this amazing paint program. And it was just really hard to follow. I mean, it could do every, it was like you had one grid of all the possibilities. And you know, you could do this and that. And it was pretty impressive. And they came to us to do packaging. And we presented like five different ideas. Our favorite was the cigar box, because that's what artists usually put materials in. So we got this cigar box from Napa Valley, you know, and had that all lined up. And then we showed like the classic Adobe systems packaging and all lined up. And then we thought we got to throw in one crazy idea. So we went and got a paint can. I'm like, nah, that's a bad idea, because it's house paint. You know, it's not really. And it's whatever. But it was really a cheap product, you know, like 70 cents a can. And most packaging was, I think the cigar box was $4, you know. So when they got to the cigar box, they passed it around. They go, we could get sued for splinters, you know. And when they came to the can, they just fell in love with it. And that biggest lesson was don't present something you're not willing to follow through with. Yeah. Because that was what they wanted. But it turned out to be such a great form factor. The manual had to fit in there. And it turned out to be a skinny little thing you could put up on your keyboard. Yeah. And we put a poster in and you could put it in the can because it was it didn't need to fold it. It wouldn't wrinkle. Yeah, wouldn't wrinkle. Yeah. And it was a skinny poster because it was only the height of the can. Sure. And everybody had a spot somewhere in their office for a skinny poster. Not a big one. Right. You know, behind a door something. But it kind of gave us permission to do other really weird projects. People would come to us and oh, you did the paint can. Can you do blah, blah, blah. So we didn't get pigeon hold with corporate reports or anything. Yeah. You said something to the fact that the takeaway is thinking about corporate reports. If you're really good at corporate reports, then people will continue to ask you to do corporate reports. But if you're doing something thinking of it in this way, then people will ask you to do a very different and interesting creative projects. Yeah. It's true. That's awesome. Well, Cleo Huggins, I think it's that type of creative thinking and energy really continuous curiosity and learning. We're so lucky in our field and our industry that you gave a few years of your life and career to this very important point that it was really truly needed. And we're so lucky that you were the one that was the person that created that first music font and then everything kind of flowed from there. Whether or not you decide to come back to dealing with smooth or the font world or just continue to do things, I hope you'll continue to talk to us about it and educate us about what that process was like and give us your thoughts because I've realized how little I knew about this whole field and how much more there is to know about the history and the process. I can't thank you enough for spending a little bit of time with us today giving us a little bit of that history. It's awesome. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you. It's so fun to at least feel like it's held through time somewhat. Yeah. It was so great at the time to just be lucky enough to be in that position. Absolutely. David, this was great. This is amazing. What an amazing story is so fun to talk to you, Cleo. Wow. Well, we will have further font discussions. I'm sure you and I, David, but I'm not sure if any of them will top this, unless Cleo decides to come back at some point and talk to us again. Until that point, folks, we hope you enjoyed this one. Thanks for listening. We will talk to you next time. That's it for today's episode of Scoring Notes. If you like the podcast, we'd love it if you could take a moment to follow us on your favorite podcast app and rate us and leave a review. Scoring Notes is a production of NYC Music Services. Head over to scoringnotes.com for lots more content about music notation software and related technology and to listen to all of our past podcast episodes. I'm Phillip Rothman and we'll see you next time.