Method and system for electronically creating and publishing music instrument instructional material using a computer network

Abstract

A system and method that allows an on-line user of a wide area network to remotely author and publish instructional material for musical instruments for the purposes of dissemination to other on-line users. Authors create solo musical passages pertaining to a specific instrument, accompanying musical arrangements and textual annotations which are stored on a remote server. This information is then dynamically published visually as standard music notation or tablature, and can be heard aurally as either digital audio or by using the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard. The playback of musical examples in this material may be customized, allowing users to change the tempo of the music, to modify the instrument sounds used, or to play subsets of the presented musical examples. Authors can update their music at any time, and since the music is dynamically published, these changes are instantaneously reflected in its published visual and aural forms. All authoring, publishing, and viewing of this material uses temporary applications that operate with a standard Internet browser in conjunction with software that operates on the remote server. These applications utilize the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) that is a standard protocol of the World Wide Web.