Online Music Education: Visualization Aggregator Platform Goals And Synergies

Currently, online teaching solutions are more or less stuck at the stage of video lesson collections - some offering synchronization with simple (for the main part single voice or part) notation, but most relying on a range of in-video inlays, and supporting only limited interaction.

The idea of an entirely graphical environment tying together notation, freely exchangeable instrument models and theory tools, and providing complete configuration freedom is perhaps the next major step in the development of online music teaching solutions.

Assuming such a system were available, what user needs would or could it answer? We identify some of the energies and synergies the world music visualization platform has the potential to release in the longer term.

'Why this list?'. Well: because all the points touched on have been mentioned in previous posts, but sometimes in rather specific contexts. I feel an urge to gather, summarize, abstract and generalize.

The list items have been loosely categorized as 'Emotional', 'Organizational' and 'Technical', broadly reflecting three interworking levels: that of users, tools and technologies.

Online Music Education: Visualization Aggregator Platform

Visual models are fine, but once in a while it can be helpful to give the imagination a clean slate. In contrast to earlier 'overview' posts this time without a swathe of accompanying images.

Complete Configuration Freedom Of Choice

Complete Configuration Freedom Of Choice

Scores and Notations	Instruments and Tuning	2- And 3D Theory Tools
Supporting Applications	Teachers / Mentors	Color And Other Prefs

Goals and Synergies

Emotional Goals and Synergies

• Counter the drift towards a global musical monoculture: celebrate instrumental diversity with world music instruments, tools, cultures and perspectives
• Grass-roots, person-to-person teaching and enablement, connecting emotional intelligence, musicality and virtuosity
• Driving global, cross-cultural social value: hence non-profit, largely open-source, with commons-based peer production (CBPP).
• Center all activity around the user's choice of teacher and music
• The re-democratization of music: encourage the playful, communicative and socially immersive aspects of music over the competitive
• Exploit the brain's formidable visual and spatial reasoning
• Fuel a renaissance in participatory community dance and music
• Help render work irrelevant: providing occupation for idle hands and liberated minds
• Data, story, goal, metaphor. Enable musical storytelling across a range of disciplines
• Mutual empowerment through the gift of own time and skills
• Support comparative musicology across a wide range of world musical cultures
• Provide the tools to secure grassroots teacher earning potential - at lowest possible cost
• provide an antidote to the music industry's more toxic business practices and role models
• offer a familiar route into a musical future otherwise dominated by exponential technological advance and bewildering change

Organizational Goals and Synergies

• Dynamic application of music theory as opposed to static explanation
• Provide in as far as possible culture-agnostic visual models, leaving their interpretation to the teacher
• Management of musical complexity: a catalyst for communication between musicologists, engineers and musicians
• A toolset in support of P2P video chat, using ANY music source, instrument configuration, theory tool, mentor or location
• Liberate musical learning and interworking through global visibility, ease of access and interactivity
• An integration framework for artificial and machine intelligence with on-demand insights
• Expose relationships between notation, instrument fingerings and abstract theory through score driven visual animation and interworking
• Help users take instrumental and theoretical 'ownership' by giving them equal prominence with notation
• Aggregate everything into one highly configurable and personalisable online music learning platform
• Power of the crowd: from experiment to experience and consensus, with 'best of visual class' instrument and tool implementations
• Reduce superfluous and toxic travel
• Take a decisive stance against raptor economics and wealth hoarding. Get earnings working in and for the grass-roots music community.
• Where visual classification trees are missing (as for theory tools), provide them
• No advertising, but if there is a demand, links (via shopping-cart icon) to curated, user-rated directories of hand-built products
• Provide sufficient but dependable, genre-authentic reference models

Technical Goals and Synergies

• Focus: first and foremost graphical, thereafter -in as far as possible- multimedia-immersive
• Simple, flexible and robust reuse mechanism favouring easily extendable visual model(s) over absolute dimensioning accuracy
• Real-time single page application (SPA). Everything dynamically loaded: no installations, no 'plugins'
• Build on other open-source initiatives in music publishing and accessibility
• Event- and data-driven, in-browser SVG- and CSS using cutting-edge visualization libraries.
• Device-responsive timeline-based but application agnostic -hence reusable- framework
• Visual consistency through hardware timers, algorithmic placement and styling guidelines
• Work to the 80:20 rule (get the important stuff right all the time rather than everything right some of the time).

World Music Aggregator Platform Aim
Global P2P Teaching And Learning

Big, brave, open-source, non-profit, community-provisioned, cross-cultural and feather duster 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..

Potential Crowdfunder? First Name Email Address

Once crowd-funded, everything is going to go into overdrive. If you are reasonably familiar with the blog's content and can suggest areas you feel would add value, best to do so now. :-)

Because it's focus is entirely graphical, don't expect this platform to replace the many other excellent sites dedicated to mainstream instruments. Moreover, while providing profound visual insights, it leaves musical their interpretation (which may differ depending on culture or genre) to those who adopt it as a teaching platform, toolset and reference.

As with other music sites, subscription-based usage is envisaged. Our aim is to keep the costs as low as possible, and, as a non-profit, where surfeit exists, re.in.vest. There is nothing stopping a non-profits generating earnings: they just have to put it back to use - generally in the same year.

While the P2P interworking aspects have only been dealt with conceptually, the basic top-to-bottom mechanisms for instrument and theory tool configuration, population (personalization), docking and synchronization have been prototyped, demonstrate feasibility, and now beg to be fleshed out and scaled. Help us take delivery of social value to the next level.

What it will deliver is
o motivation (worldwide choice of teacher, instrument and tools)
o immediacy (cittern, CGDAD tuning, capo 2nd fret, driven by the user's own music source: no problem), and
o immersion (notation, instrumentation and theory tools woven into one coherent, synchronized dynamic whole - layered with stylistic cues from synchronized P2P audio and video).

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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