How we made the Beethoven's 9th Symphony app
Beethoven's 9th Symphony is one of the greatest works of art. It is vast, complicated and instantly recognised by people around the world. It's Europe's unofficial anthem, heralds the close of the year in Japan, and memorably celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. But what do most people actually know about it?
Sure, it was written by Beethoven, it has four movements and features a huge chorus and soloists singing in German. But what is the meaning of B9? When and how did Beethoven compose it? Why has it earned a special place in so many cultures? The reason we wanted to make an app about Beethoven's 9th Symphony was to explore all of this in depth and hopefully to create something entertaining at the same time.
To proceed we needed several things. A crack team of app designers and engineers are a given, but we also needed a musical partner – an organisation rooted in the world of popular music, able to help negotiate the complex rights around musical performances. We knew we wanted to compare multiple alternative performances of the symphony, and the record company Deutsche Grammophon was superbly placed to provide the very best of these. Their team also helped us to interview an array of interesting people to talk about Beethoven and his work in the insights section of the app.
Then we needed an author who could explain and comment on the work. We invited the acclaimed teacher, composer and broadcaster David Owen Norris, who did a great job of writing not only an integrated book but also a synchronised blow-by-blow commentary that you can read as the symphony plays. David has a wry sense of humour that shines through his intelligent text.
The B9 app is enormously complicated with numerous moving parts. Probably the most challenging aspect was perfectly synchronising the four legendary performances. This sounds simple until you realise that each one is a different duration, and the four conductors unpredictably speed up and slow down in each section.
In the app you can seamlessly and note-perfectly switch between performances, anywhere in the symphony. To achieve this we needed to write some cunning software and to painstakingly map the exact timing of every note in each performance. A time-consuming task, but the end result is enormously satisfying.
Beethoven's 9th Symphony app screen Photograph: Touch Press

We also devised a visual map of the key changes throughout the work. We tried very (very) hard with some amazing permutations, but none of them worked and that particular piece of design never made it into the shipping app. Instead we simply indicate the current key as a changing strip of colours along the top of the scrolling score.
When the app was almost ready, the marketing department suddenly suggested that we should give it away for free. This rather flew in the face of its six-figure budget. But with Apple's encouragement, we agreed to experiment with the first Touch Press freemium app. You get two minutes of the symphony with all four performances free of charge, so you can try out all of the features before we ask you to part with £9.99 as an in-app-purchase to complete the work.
Into the bargain you also receive David Owen Norris' book, his expert analysis and video interviews with a wonderful cast of characters ranging from the rock journalist Paul Morley to the great maestro Leonard Bernstein, speaking from beyond the grave.
The app has now been downloaded an astonishing 680,000 times. For any piece of classical music to be downloaded that many times is remarkable. Of course, not everyone went on to unlock the full symphony – but plenty have. There is no doubt we have reached a wider and different audience than if we had charged our standard £9.99 up-front.
Will apps like Beethoven's 9th Symphony bring a new audience to classical music? I certainly hope so. We've heard from many teachers who use the app to enliven their music classes, and we receive numerous emails from users who feel that this way of experiencing classical music is nothing short of revolutionary.
We're often asked: why only iOS? These are challenging apps and we are determined to offer an exceptional experience to our audience. These premium apps demand a lot of memory, graphics processing and audio capability. The iPad is really the only platform available today where we have sufficient oomph in a stable operating system environment, combined with a high-quality delivery channel in the iTunes App Store. Right now Android is a fragmented environment in terms of both hardware and software, although watch this space as the tablet universe is evolving fast.
Max Whitby is co-founder and CEO of Touch Press – follow Max on Twitter @touchpress
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Culture Professionals Network.