Choral Public Domain Library

Since Choralia (http://www.choralia.net) has become "official sponsor" of CPDL, I'm receiving an increasing number of requests by CPDL users to contribute to Choralia with their own choir training aids. Apparently, there are several people who create training aids for their choirs, and they are ready to share them with other choirs.

Doing that within Choralia is a bit tricky because, if others contribute, some items (such as: availability and traceability of scores used as the reference source; residual errors; intellectual property right issues) become more complicated to manage with respect to the case where I'm the only person involved, as it is now. Managing all of this may become too complicated, as Choralia is just a a hobby for me, and I don't want it becomes similar to my daily business-headache .

I think that sharing free training aids to learn choral works may be within the scope and spirit of CPDL, such as sharing choral sheet music, MIDI files, composer information, etc. . If this is accepted, I would propose the following approach:

- CPDL users who create choir training aids for a certain work upload them as "playable files" (e.g., mp3) on a server (either on the CPDL server or on external servers);

- something "magic" (category, template, ...) is added by the user to the correspoinding work page, so that the name of the work and the link to the file containing the training aids ("shallow linking" in the case of externally hosted files) also appear on a specific wiki page where all the works with available free training aids are listed, possibly grouped by composer name. This is to allow users to easily identify works with training aids available, when availability of free training aids is important for them.

I initially thought to submit this proposal to the part of the forums that is restricted to the CPDL admins, but I think it would be good if also normal users can provide their feedback on this idea.

Max

I've moved this thread to the forum I think it belongs in. This seems like a good idea to me and within the scope of CPDL since we already provide MIDI files, as you indicated. I suppose there are several ways of incorporating training aids into score pages but perhaps a subtitle under "music files", below editions of the work, would be the best way. The score page could be added to a category as you suggested by means of a new template.

What does everyone else think?

Rob

What's the difference between a choir training aid and a normal MIDI file ?

Generally speaking, training aids do not require the user to be familiar with the handling of MIDI files, such as muting or reducing the volume of all voices except the one that the user is willing to learn, and emphasizing the desired voice instead.

Furtermore, some training aids are actually sung, including lyrics, either by a synthesized voice or by an actual "human" singer. This is not possible using MIDI files and normal MIDI players. Please visit the "mp3 catalogue" page at http://www.choralia.net for mp3 examples of synthesized-voice training aids.

Some training aids are "audio-video", i.e., they also show the score on the screen, and the notes/lyrics are highlighted when they are sung. This is supposed to help singers reading the score if their sight-singing skills are limited. You can do something similar from MIDI files, but this also requires some specific music software, and the notation obtained from MIDI files is always an approximation of the score (e.g., a note that should be represented as E sharp in a certain context will be probably represented as F when obtained from MIDI import).

Max

Thanks! Though it's not difficult to move a fader, you're right about severe limits of MIDI (for instance enharmony!), not to mention that one needs to have a score editor or a MIDI player able to tune each voice separately. And videos allowing to read the score is a great help, too (there are some on YouTube, BTW).