Trinket Introduces Interactive Web-based Music Notation

Previously we’ve talked about Scorch as a way to embed notation into webpages and publish music to your ensemble. A new release from Trinket has brought a new level of interactivity to web-based music notation, and while it will likely not replace Scorch from a publishing perspective, it’s incredibly exciting from a teaching perspective. The release of Trinket’s music notation features comes in support of Open Music Theory, an “open-source, interactive, online ‘text’book for college-level music theory courses” published online by Hybrid Pedagogy Press. As part of Open Music Theory’s work examples, Trinket gives the authors the ability to write examples and have listeners modify them freely and hear their results. Consider the following standard exercise in counterpoint:

 

(not a live embed – please click through to the interactive version from Open Music Theory)

 

Users edit the music by typing in the textbox at the bottom of the widget. Notation is edited in real-time, and the users can immediately playback their work to listen to it. The commands at the top of the widget allow users to save their results as a new Trinket widget, or e-mail, copy a link, or embed the widget directly in their own blogs or websites. While I have not tested this to confirm, it stands to reason that since these widgets use standard HTML to embed in a webpage, users could embed their answers into submissions through common LMS’ used by universities and K-12 institutions to bring into a formal class setting as well. I have successfully tested Trinket on an iPad within Safari for those of you with iPad sets or student devicesl.

 

Trinket requires a free account to sign-up, and once you are registered, choose “New Trinket” and “Music” and the music editing box appears:

(not a live embed – Trinket.io)

 

By going to the setup menu, you can edit the parameters of the excerpt in text:

 

Note that here you can add additional staves, change clefs and edit the key, tempo and time-signature.

 

Both Trinket and Open Music Theory represent a major step forward in our ability to communicate musical concepts on the Web. Trinket is not going to replace Scorch as a publishing tool (there is no import ability and sounds are limited), but as a teaching tool it gives us the ability to present notation-based challenges to our students, and have them edit and submit them without having to have a separate notation program– all within an existing webpage and software. Furthermore– it’s just fun to edit the textline and have the music respond (and for beginning students, requires constant practice of note names and identification).

 

Can you envision a use for Trinket in any of your instructional materials? If you give Trinket a try, post the link to any of your experiments below!