Music/Music content

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Audio files

Our mission is to find music from all over the world and from several eras. Music is a common language that all nations and culture speak and since the ancient years has been a means of communication. Music available in relation to the XOs can be found in a number of formats.

Music contributors

• Isabella S'ewart Gardner Museum: The Isabella S'ewart Gardner Museum is in the process of sharing with the OLPC Music community its music library and "The Concert" podcasts, in order to help us in making western classical music available to children all over the world.

Sound samples

Providing to children sound samples, which they can combine and express their creativity and musical inclination.

• Sound samples: There is a large collection of new and original samples that have been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger - one of the Csounders - specifically to support the OLPC developers, students and XO users. These are sounds for the children of the world. They are free and available for downloading and use in your music and activities.

Spreading the music

Here you can find an indicative list of music that could be included in our libraries. We are willing to find freely licensed copies of this music to be included in the XOs and the school server. Feel free to recommend music, which could be associated with the OLPC project and its educational mission and participate in our projects.

Sheet Music

Another significant resource for helping the children to enhance their music skills is by providing them with the music sheets of the music associated with the XOs.

Examples of similar activities can be found below.

• The Free Software application for creating musical scores and printing sheet music is Lilypond. The input is plain text. PDF and MIDI files are the output. Mutopia is a project for creating free (Creative Commons and Public Domain) scores using Lilypond.

• The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) was community site which was collecting scans Public Domain music scores mostly in PDF format. It is currently on hiatus following legal threats. It is expected to re-open once these have been worked out. Before it was shut down it had the most comprehensive collection of music scores available freely on the internet.

• There are music OCR programs for capturing music from scanned pages and converting to MIDI or other formats, and utilities to convert between MIDI and several score formats. The process generally requires manual editing, since music notation is complex, and can be difficult to interpret and to lay out in a pleasing as well as functional manner.

• You can find a Directory of music score sites here.

Music Education and Theory

Music education is not only about listening to or playing music.

It is also about studying the fundaments of music - that is music theory, harmonies and chords, or about music notation.

It is about learning how to compose your own music.

It is about exercising your ears and finding ways to improve your improvisation skills and being able to enjoy the music you like whenever and wherever you like.

It is about studying the history of music and learning more about the differences in the music cultures of nations worldwide.

This is why there is even greater space for all of you to contribute to our project. Please, everyone, who is interested in resources, which could be useful in this field, take the initiative and list them below.

Help us in providing strong music theory background to the XO users, by sharing with us your ideas and participating with your relevant projects.