About LalaScript

Our mission

Tell someone you are a classically trained pianist and you will almost never hear "I don't play." You hear "I used to play." Or "I wish I hadn't quit." Said with a little regret, about a version of themselves they liked.

It is most people. Two in three Americans learned an instrument at some point. Most no longer play. Half of the people who stopped playing the piano say they wish they had not. A third of adults in Britain wish they had kept up with music in some form, more than they regret giving up any other thing they studied.

Nobody stops because they stopped loving music. They stop because at some point the piece they actually wanted to play was out of reach, and there was no teacher, no time, and no version of it written for the hands they had. So they played something else for a while, and then they stopped.

We think that is a loss worth working on. Music is the one language every person on earth already speaks. It calms people, it carries them through the worst weeks of their lives, it gathers them in rooms and makes strangers into a choir. A world with more music in it is a better world, and a person who keeps playing is better off than one who gave it up. That is the whole reason this company exists: to give people one more reason to keep going, and to take away one of the reasons they quit.

Here is what that means in practice, and what it does not.

The classics are the foundation of playing, and there is no substitute for them. A Chopin nocturne is learned by practising the Chopin nocturne. A teacher does not thin out a piece a student is studying, and neither do we. Nothing here is a shortcut through the repertoire, and nothing here is meant to be.

LalaScript is a tool for musicians first. The arranger who needs the part in another key by tonight. The teacher who needs a duet for two students at different levels. The band leader with a chart that has to come down a tone. The choir director holding a PDF nobody can edit. This is work musicians have always done by hand, bar by bar, and LalaScript does it from one sentence, with every bar checked before it is written.

It is also for the person with music in their head and no way to write it down. A melody hummed in the kitchen, a feeling with no words, an idea for a piece for you and your friends. Create turns that into a real score, in notation anyone can read and play, and the edit box lets them shape it the way a composer shapes a draft. The idea is theirs. The feeling is theirs. We only hold the pen.

We believe this matters more every year, not less. As more of life gets automated and more fields need less of a person's attention, the one thing that will be needed more and more is a creative mind. We are here to enable it. More people writing down their own music is more music in the world, and more music in the world is the point.

And it is for the person standing on the other side of a door they think closed behind them. They found a piece they love, opened the sheet music, and it was written for someone else's hands. For them, a version they can play today is not a lesser thing. It is the difference between playing and not playing. The music stays the music; it just comes within reach. Many of them go on to the real thing, and that is the point.

Music should not be something you used to do.

The founder

Ohad Gev is a classical pianist from New York. He studied piano performance at the University of Colorado Boulder, then taught piano and violin for years before the Sofaer Global MBA at Tel Aviv University, where LalaScript won the 2025 Arlette Sofaer Prize. He founded LalaScript Inc. in 2025 as its sole founder and builds it himself. LinkedIn.

The idea came from teaching. The strongest thing a young student has going for them is wanting to play, and wanting to play means playing what they want to hear. His seven-year-old violin students wanted Taylor Swift, and there is no Taylor Swift written for a seven-year-old beginning violinist. LalaScript began as the way to write that version, and grew into a tool for every musician who needs a score to fit the player in front of them.

What it does today

Upload a PDF, MusicXML or MuseScore file. LalaScript reads it as music rather than as a picture, so you can transpose it, simplify it to a level, or edit it by describing the change in plain words. Hear it in the browser, then download it as MusicXML, MuseScore, PDF or MP3. It also writes new scores from a description or a hummed melody, for one player or a few. The product is LalaScript Studio.

Our Technology & Research

Behind the studio is a longer piece of work on two problems that have resisted software for decades.

The first is reading. Most of the world's written music exists as pictures: scans, photographs, PDFs, printed books. Turning a picture of a score into the music it describes, with every note, rhythm, voice and instrument intact, is a difficult, longstanding problem in music technology. Printed notation is dense, varied and full of meaning that lives between the symbols. We test our progress against real-world scores with known correct answers, not just ideal examples.

The second is understanding. Once a score is music rather than a picture, a program has to know what it is looking at: which line is the melody, what the harmony is doing, what an instrument can and cannot play, what changes when a piece moves to another key or a smaller hand. That knowledge is what lets a score be transposed, simplified, rearranged for other players or extended into a new piece. Even small mistakes matter to the musician reading the result. Our engine is built on written musical rules, and it grows with every real request a musician brings it.

Together these two areas, recognition and understanding, are the foundation of everything LalaScript does and most of what it will do.

Beyond the Studio

Today musicians use LalaScript to work with their own scores. The technology reaches further than that.

A publisher's catalogue could become editable and playable, not just printable. A school could have every piece in the key and at the level each student needs. A notation program could take an edit in plain words. An archive could make centuries of printed music searchable as music. A composer could go from an idea to a finished part for each player inside one tool.

Written music has been fixed to the page for five hundred years. Our ambition is to build the technology that lets it move: read from any page, understood as music, and shaped for whoever is about to play it.

Contact

Press, partnership and investor requests: [email protected]. Company page: LinkedIn.