Collaborative solution for music education

In the area of technology enhanced music training, cooperative work is becoming an increasingly demanding concept. It can be used to exploit new modalities of training and to reduce the set up time necessary for the organization of groups and class rooms - integrating distributed systems for audiovisual processing and general control (e.g., synchronous playback, recording, monitoring progresses). To this end, a flexible model to cope with groups, roles, external tools, and large sets of features is required. This paper presents a flexible cooperative environment to facilitate the creation of a variety of cooperative applications and in particular to the implementation of cooperative music lessons. The solution has been used for the implementation of cooperative music lessons allowing the control and supervising. The work has been developed for the IMAESTRO STREP FP6 project of the European Commission for developing cooperative educational multimodal tools in the Max/MSP. The work has been based on MPEG-SMR as standard Symbolic Music Representation format for music notation coding.