Sibelius music notation software comes packaged with a nifty little tool for Internet publishing called Scorch. This tool includes a browser plug-in that allows sheet music to be embedded into a web page. When in the stopped mode, the embedded widget simply displays staff notation as a graphic. Clicking the play button allows the user to hear music performed in time as the cursor scrolls along the staff. Anyone can freely download Scorch to properly view the page, much like the Flash player plug-in. This ability to share and play musical scores over the Internet has great potential for Web2.0 educational use. The download is available at the following URL: http://www.sibelius.com/products/scorch/index.html.
Full Sail’s new Music Production degree will include Sibelius (and Scorch) as part of the student laptop package. I plan to take full advantage of this web2.0 tool in the new online version of my Music Theory course. To share my work from Sibelius, I can simply choose ‘Export Scorch Web Page’ from the file menu. The resulting html file can then be uploaded to a web server along with the Sibelius sheet music file it refers to.
Students could easily accomplish this using a Mobile Me iDisk account. One would simply navigate to http://www.me.com and log in with the appropriate user name and password. Once logged into the online interface, clicking the iDisk icon will quickly show the file system for this account on the server. The ‘web’ folder has a subfolder called ‘sites’. This is where the code would be stored for any site created through the iWeb application. The intuitive tools provided on site make it simple to create a new subfolder and upload the Scorch files with no need to use iWeb at all. The URL for this new page will be http://web.me.com/username/subfolder/file.html.
Once the page is uploaded to the web we can easily share our musical efforts. Pasting a Scorch link into a Blogger blog post for instance would be a great way to share music and invite comments from the rest of the class.
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