Collaborative Working for Music Education

In the area of technology enhanced music training, cooperative work is becoming an increasingly feasible concept. It can be used to experiment with and to exploit new modalities of training and to reduce the set up time necessary for the organization of group work - integrating distributed systems for audio-visual processing and general control (i.e. synchronous playback, recording). To this end, a flexible model to cope with groups, roles, tools, and large sets of features is required. This paper presents a flexible Cooperative Work environment for Max MSP to facilitate the creation of a variety of cooperative applications (not limited to educational uses) structurally supporting: group role and tool concepts, undo/redo, joining and rejoining, preserving the simplicity and consistency of commands, etc. The system can be used for a large variety of multimedia/multimodal music applications