Music Visualisation Aggregator Platform: How Does It All Work Together?

Highly interactive, hot-loadable, on-screen configurable, score-driven animations - synchronised with music notation in a customisable, in-browser environment?

How's that supposed to work?

Big, brave, open-source, non-profit, community-provisioned, cross-cultural and sonic the hedgehog crazy. → Like, share, back-link, pin, tweet and mail. Hashtags? For the crowdfunding: #VisualFutureOfMusic. For the future live platform: #WorldMusicInstrumentsAndTheory. Or simply register as a potential crowdfunder..

How Does It All Work Together?

Magick!

By now you will probably have come across several screenshots of the world music aggregator platform's user interface, and possibly have been lucky enough to stumble across the odd video.
It may, nevertheless, still be a little unclear how all this hangs together.

Keeping in mind that the aggregator platform and this blog are entirely separate entities, once again, a diagram to the rescue... Read on.

The Aggregator Platform

In a not-too-distant future, our world music aggregator platform will allow users to select and populate their environment from amongst thousands of fully-dynamic, interactive, score-driven instrument models and theory tools spanning the entire treasury of world and experimental music.


Each family of animations will be built from a generic base, meaning that under progressive application of each of the entire range of configuration possibilities, any generic base may yield hundreds of individual instrument configurations.

To get started, let's assume a score has been loaded from one of the many online repositories worldwide.
On playback, the score is used to drive a number of animations user-selected from menus (LHS) which have been populated from global classification trees situated along the top of the interface:

Music Visualisation Aggregator Platform Nitty Gritty

Potential Crowdfunder? First Name Email Address

1. Playback Controls. Score playback (step, tempo-governed play or fast forward) provides the attached animations with a vertical selection at the score's current position.
2. You should be able to make out the (currently red) highighted notes. Dynamic updates to the animations themselves are held in synchronisation by the score playback mechanism. In it's current form, notation highlighting is at times a little tricky to follow, but to date, visual animation response times have proven entirely acceptable. Colour conventions are -whenever changed- applied across the board. Scrolling is still a little tacky, but simple to improve.
3. User menus are populated with scores, instruments, genres, tools, bands, friends, students, teachers, videos, events, games and esoterica from the upper (global) menu bar, by drag and drop directly from the corresponding data tree. There is one additional user menu concerned with instrument configuration from a generic base. This, in turn, can be used by authorised users to add instrument configurations to the global instrument tree in the upper menu. In this sense there is a two-way flow between these two menus.
4. Visualisations can be loaded dynamically into the animation window during score playback, instantly falling into step with the other animations. Equally, an animation can be removed at will, again without disturbing the other animations.
5. The user already has -or will have- control over the active or contributing voices, the score playback speed and positioning in the score.
6. All animations are held in synch with the score during playback.
7. Global menus auto-retract, leaving more working screen area for animations
8. Same for user menus

For these behaviours to continue to work in the long run will require close attention to some simple, well established programming and integration conventions. Publishing these is one of the goals of the crowdfunding project.
If you know where to look, however, many future features are already described within this blog - not in the sequential posts list, but under the banner menus.

This Blog

The blog is initially intended as a catalyst or springboard for the world music aggregator platform crowdfunding initiative, providing insights into it's main goals and progress, plus (banner menus) longer-term goals.

On completion of the initial crowdfunding, it will be cleaned up and used to track subsequent rounds. I'm new to blogging and time is short, so please be patient with the many formatting niggles.

Banner Menus

On being published, every chronological post is subsequently linked to from one of the main menus. The most prolific linking is within the 'Platform' menu.
Should the chronological posts seem a little unmanageable over time, their content can still be found either within the corresponding menu tree, or by using the search field.
The Crowdfunding menu item is a currently a staging area for thoughts on the campaign, but will later track crowdfunding progress for blog readers (as opposed to campaign supporters).
Aside from chronological post and the Project menu, the blog's most prominent features are the menus covering Instrument Models and Theory Tools. These reflect, in much simplified form, the implementation goals of the platform in the near future.

Many other features (user accounts, genres, teachers, events etc) are planned, but these are all dependent on a thunderingly successful initial crowdfunding.

It is well worth looking through each of these menus, as their content gives a far closer impression of the future range of instrument models and theory tools than is available from the blog posts.

We are talking of literally thousands of instrument models and scores of theory tools, each dynamically linked to provide continuously-configurable and compatible visual continuum.

This is not rocket science, but will require discipline. With community help and standard, proven interfaces available via template to all future instrument models and theory tools, however, I firmly believe the goals to be realistic and achievable.

At the end of the day, we will have an aggregator platform spanning the entire breadth of world music instrumentation and theory, and lending itself to being driven by a variety of sources. It will provide the technical base for online, P2P teaching - worldwide.

The internet has become a vast, riotous jungle. Breaking through the dense undergrowth and getting heard is challenging. Even after many months of blogging, page visits remain low.

If this project's social potential excites you as it does me, please help spread the word.

Tweet, email, share, blog and amplify into your follower trees. Backlink where you can. Use the HTML Cheat Sheet for color picker, search for special HTML characters, get examples of the most common tags and generate any tags.

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Keywords

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online music learning, online music lessons	distance music learning, distance music lessons	remote music lessons, remote music learning
p2p music lessons, p2p music learning	music visualisation music visualization	musical instrument models interactive music instrument models
music theory tools musical theory	p2p music interworking p2p musical interworking	comparative musicology ethnomusicology
world music international music	folk music traditional music	P2P musical interworking, Peer-to-peer musical interworking
WebGL, Web3D, WebVR, WebAR	Virtual Reality, Augmented or Mixed Reality	Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
Scalar Vector Graphics, SVG	3D Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3D	X3Dom, XML3D