This page will be (for a while) mostly like my other Music HOME page, but the intent is that this will be the page that I put into the Nwc Web Ring (i.e. as my Home for that only). Until I delete stuff, though, this page bring together the fragments — past, present, and future — of the music-related web-based technology things I have played with and evolved over the last several years.
That caveat notwithstanding... if you find a problem with anything and/or if you just have any comments to make, please let me know.
What I've always wanted to be able to do on the web is to communicate with others using multi-media. And so music and pictures were among the first things I started to play with. At that point (1996), pictures were a focus and the technology was moving along. But all you have to do is scan thru my past efforts regarding music (scores) and you'll see that until recently, it was really kinda pathetic.
All that changed, coincidentally, on my birthday — on July 24th, 2001 — when I discovered that The NoteWorthy Composer folks had come out with a browser plug-in that extends the capabilities of your web browser to include the display, play back, and printing of music scores (*.nwc song files) created by The NoteWorthy Composer. The plug-in is free and you only ever have to download the latest version of it once. But you will have to do it before you can just jump right into the middle of any song from my Songs Collection.
In
the future
I will enhance this “Applet”
to make things more convenient...
but already
you will find that you can easily navigate from one Song to another.
Just
click here
to get to the first Song in my Collection
and then you can “Next” / “Previous” your way thru them all.
Within the Song Viewer
each composition is accompanied by a description,
often with pictures and
links, to make this a truly multi-media presentation
of some of my work.
Like The Composer itself, the plug-in is very easy to use though you have to understand that you really only have limited capabilites from within your browser; it's only the tip-of-the-iceberg when compared with what you can do in the DestTop App version. But as long as you are not wanting to do music composition, you should be able to “see” my songs and “watch them play” without any further instruction.
For now, I only have a single Song Collection. Expanding that to make my presentation tool more generic is described in the “future” (of this technology) section, herein.
From the very beginning when I first started playing with the web, I wanted to be able to communicate using multi-media — in particular, music as it's expressed in a music score in conjunction with images or photos associated with “the songs”.
The reason I say a music score and not a recording of someone else's music is because I have no expressive capability with something that is “just” a recording. You can “play it back”, but after you've done that, what's next? A score, on the other hand, is something that you can work with until it becomes the masterpiece that you feel like sharing with someone else.
But from the beginning, this has proven to be much more difficult than I had anticipated.
Initially I got off to a very good start on this because quite early on I discovered The NoteWorthy Composer — a Windows app that you can think of as a “word processor for music scores”. From the beginning The Composer has been so easy to use that even if you really don't know much about music composition, you could still create songs and "watch them play" because it has a play-back feature where it generates the music and shows you each note as it plays thru the score. Changing things within the score — everything from the notes themselves to what instruments are used for which parts — is all quite easy to do with The Composer. That's exactly it's raison d'être !
Another nice thing about The Composer is that it lets you create or change the lyrics and gives you help matching the words to the notes so that you end up with full control over writing your own words to any music score that you can get your hands on. Ways to do the latter include (a) writing the score note by note (The Composer lets you do that even if you do not have anything like a midi keyboard), (b) importing a .mid file from which it can fully re-generate the complete score!, or (c) if you do have capability of creating "midi input" — such as with a music keyboard, The Composer can also "write the score" for you as you play.
What frustrated me with The Composer, however, was that there was no way to present anything created with the composer on the web. I got very frustrated with having to drag people to my PC and sit them down to “present” anything that I had created. For certain situations, this is perfectly acceptable, but it drastically limits your audience.
But I did try various things as I learned more and more about web technology, all with the aim of making this vision of mine become a reality. And the rest of this section demonstrates the various attempts that I made to do this, mostly by linking to specific things that I put together as “demos” more for pushing the limits of the technology than for the content of the “samples” themselves.
In July 1997 I came out with my first attempt to “plant the seed of an idea” for publishing a live music score on the web. In my GeoCities homestead I produced a page called “my music picture idea”. I've since abandoned GeoCities but have retained the page, here, because of its historical perspective. One thing I particularily like about this demo is the rich vibrant sound of the contrabass (or is it a cello? — I've lost the score for this, unfortunately).
In retrospect, that was/is kinda pathetic but at least it explains why what I called “my first real” music animation presentation (for J.D.) came somewhat later. I know, it was only marginally better than the static picture, but I felt like I was at least going in the right direction.
My third try was a smaller-format style of a well-known duet played by me with my midi keyboard, but playing both parts separately and putting the pieces together with NoteWorthy Composer. In fact, this is exactly why I bought The Composer. My kids were just beginning to take an interest in playing our piano and I wanted to teach them this Heart And Sole duet. But I couldn't play both parts of it myself to show them so I used The Composer to put both pieces together so that they could 'see' how it goes. Of course, it was the 'real' presentation of this — done by The Composer and not this pathetic animation — that they learned it from.
And my 4th (and 5th) music offering is a bit of a departure because rather than being an attempt at animation, this one is my page for Gypsy , our 8-year-old black lab who went on to that great dawggy home in the sky in mid October, 1999. A few weeks later (Nov 5th, 1999) we did something similar in Rev. Dan's Page, when our pastor retired.
Of course, all of this is very old stuff... On my 50th birthday, as luck would have it, on 24/July/2001 I visited the NoteWorthy Software site and discovered that they had come out with the technology (the Plug-In) that led me to what I now call “ The Present state-of-the-art ” regarding this offering. I quickly did a prototype web page that hosted the Plug-in, convinced myself that this really was a dream come true... and then set about creating a tool that would let me publish “many” songs using this technology without have to get bogged down in too much tedious html programming — all the while retaining precise control over a consistent look and feel across a set of pages. I realized that I had “no idea” how I would end up wanting these pages to look.
In this section I plan on outlining where I'm hoping to go with the tools I've been working on (in Java) to help me “publish” collections of Nwc songs.
The following are issues that I need to address in this context:
Home page
in Groton.
is a constant challenge...