Klarinet Archive - Posting 000091.txt from 2010/09

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Pros and Cons of Free Sheet Music
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:51:43 -0400

On 09/06/2010 05:50 PM, Oliver Seely wrote:
> Joe raises some interesting and important points for which I don't pretend to have answers. Regarding his question about whether my friend did the extraction of parts and if so what happened to them, I have no idea. They were there for the taking if he wanted to do the work. I would have done it but I would have charged him for my time.

Of course -- your time is limited and where you don't have a personal
motivation, it's perfectly reasonable to ask a fee. What I'm getting at
is that if he _did_ extract the parts (why not ask him?), it's a shame
they're not available on your site.

> As for the extent to which my site is a community place or clearing house, again, my university doesn't have software installed to monitor visitors and downloads so I don't know how many people take a look at things every day and how many download my files.

By "community place" or "clearing house" I'm meaning something quite
specific -- which is that the site could shift its focus from simply
making available stuff you've done, to coordinating a community of
interested people who share and spread the load of creating scores and
parts. That's less about number of visitors and download statistics
than it is about making relatively small gestures to indicate to people
how they can get involved (e.g. having a page saying "How you can
contribute", making a discussion board or mailing list for interested
people, allowing people to post ads offering bounties for work they want
done...). You might also want to try connecting your site with IMSLP,
where there is an existing (and growing) community.

> For a short period of time, perhaps one year, my university subscribed to a monitoring service. During that time, maybe 10 years ago, my page had around a hundred visitors every day, well in excess of the level of visitation enjoyed by any of the several dozen pages I managed in my own profession as a professor of chemistry.

If you're interested in stats, you could try a service like Google
Analytics (there are others, but despite my big-name-phobia it does look
like Google's is one of the best).

> I'm still at the level of the amused observer of technology. I don't know where any of this is going. From time to time I'm pleased to learn about performances of pieces which almost certainly came originally from my page, but even there I can't be certain.

Well, small and obvious thing, but -- do your scores contain a notice to
the extent of something like, "Performance from this score is not just
permitted but encouraged, but please let me know of any performances
where you use it"? :-)

> In any case, I'm always delighted to see young people performing some of these little known works and it's nice to fantasize that I had something to do with their musical education.

A few years ago I wrote up some information-theoretic functions for a
numerical linear algebra package called Octave (its a free/open source
implementation of MATLAB). It was just something I needed to do for a
project I was working on back then.

Octave has an online repository for community-contributed functions, so
I posted them on the mailing list and said something to the effect of
"If you want 'em, you can have 'em." Someone else there had also been
working on some info-theory stuff, he accepted them and committed them
to the repository -- I thought not much more.

Anyway, last year I was installing a new Linux distro on my machine and
of course was installing Octave, and noted that there was a related
package called "octave-informationtheory". So I installed that, and
there were my functions -- packaged and available for millions of people.

I can't put into words properly what a buzz that was. :-D

Anyway, back to the musical side of things -- what you're doing is great
-- the next step, I'd suggest, is to find some way to encourage those
young people to GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU and take part in what you're doing.

You may be surprised where that leads ... :-)

Best wishes,

-- Joe
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