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The project is based on the "Musik-Kolleg", which Manfred Schilder has been conducting for more than 25 years for pupils and an interested public. What is new about Schilder's method is that in the score special brackets mark the relevant passages. During the traditional live-lectures, in which the score is projected onto the screen, Schilder uses a pointer to indicate the notes played simultaneously. Whereas in traditional explanations of music pieces the explanation is more or less separated from the score, Schilder aims at an integrated presentation. He compares his method to an illustration of landscapes. The traditional system corresponds to a teacher explaining the landscape by means of a map. With Schilder’s idea, however, the teacher moves into the landscape and explains it from within. On the adaptation for the online-version it was attempted to maintain the characteristics of Schilder's way of presentation to keep future live-lectures compatible with the online-version. The brackets introduced by Schilder were refined so that they could be changed into a coloured marking. Adaptation of the method On the adaptation for the online-version original music from Audio-CDs was used instead of MIDI music, in spite of higher storage requirements. As Manfred Schilder could observe during many years of his music evenings with parents, the attention of the audience was more intensive when original instruments were used, e.g. a real piano (regardless of the pupil’s skill) than during the use of digital accompaniment. The online-version of "Musik-Kolleg" differs in several ways from the live-version: whereas during the live-version an integrated experience is aimed at, the Online-version uses a modular structure. This offers the opportunity to repeat smaller units at will and to discover and study other parts, starting from one special passage . Thus the exploration of the piece can proceed gradually and in any direction, forwards, backwards, resp. laterally to other structural units. For a later stage of "Musik-Kolleg" it is planned to offer a comparison between structural similarities in different pieces of music. Technical realisations For the first fifteen music pieces the technical realisation was carried out in 1996 by Johann Stockinger from the Institute of Ethnology of Vienna University in such a way that WWW-users with standard browsers and players can have access to "Musik-Kolleg". That is why only those types of media were used that did not need any additional programming. The sound recording was available in 2 stages of quality (11khz, 8bit) mono resp. stereo in 3 different formats (RIFF WAV-format, Audio Interchange format AIF, and Sun Audio format AU). Further on the Sun Audio Format AU was replaced by the MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP3). With music pieces available on CD, the user could insert the CD in his CD-ROM and recall the samples directly at top quality. To give the online-user the chance to read the music along the individual bars a method was developed that uses digital video sequences. For this purpose a few bars were placed in a graphic and a special copy was made of each bar with the active part coloured light green. The synchronisation of notes and sounds was achieved by means of a video processing software (Adobe Premiere), in which every bar represents s a point of synchronisation. The videos were filed in two formats (MS Video for Windows and QuickTime) and in two sound qualities (mono and stereo). While following the digital video, the user needs to concentrate on a few bars only; but he can also recall the music of all the bars in the special sample together with the structural explanations inserted by Schilder. Because of the advances in techniques new interactive methods could be used for the recently created music pieces (Strauß, Hauer, Schönberg). These pieces were realised by Martin Zehetbauer using Macromedia Flash. Now Shockwave (SWF) sequences were used instead of the digital video sequences. Thanks A special thank you is due to the orchestras and persons who gave permission to use their original recordings for the project:
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