Episode: 1909
Title: HPR1909: Creating an Open, Embedded-Media Music Textbook
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1909/hpr1909.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:03:35

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All right we're ready and this paper is re-invigorating, re-oncreating salt and embedded media
music textbook for the digital age and please welcome Dr. Johnson-Cult of the University
thank you very glad to be here I'd never been to this conference before I'm I'm finding it a
very friendly place and actually a lot more useful than some of the other conferences I've been to
so thank you for welcoming me here I'm really glad that you guys did your presentation right before
mind because you kind of took care of some of the issues that I was going to bring up and I can kind
of move along to some of the the meat of the matter I count myself as one of those professors who
cares deeply about the price of textbooks and wants to try and do something about it and the
presentation today is essentially a summary of how I did it for one of my classes haven't done
for all of them yet but for one class I've done it we've just heard a discussion I mean what I
really liked about y'all's presentation is that you have like actual facts and figures and
data I didn't bother finding that stuff I just go from anecdotal evidence that this stuff
costs a lot students don't like it they don't buy the books and so no I intuitively know these things
and so in my counterpoint cloud this is a class where I was using a textbook that if you bought it
new cost 125 dollars for an edition that last was updated in 1999 and required a companion workbook
that was about another 65 dollars and there were a few stages well let me go to my first slide there
that's my slide there for that's the money problem that represents the money problem and so
you know textbooks they just cost way way too much and it's getting better in some way I mean
some of these electronic alternatives help they they make it less expensive to get the materials
you need for the semester however I've got a big problem with the business model of the many
of the publishers where you you pay a certain amount and then once the semester is over it goes
away and so the students who might be interested in keeping it for a while longer can't do it and so
that's because somebody has run off with their stuff and so I thought I would try to fix this
problem for at least one of my class oh I have a list of some of the textbooks I did run down some
of the textbooks that I know about who do this kind of thing and just give an idea of like how much
they cost and how long you get to access to it there weren't any options like this for counterpoint
so most of them allow you like one semester's worth maybe for a whole year some of them
um but every one of them has access that is given for a while and then denied after the
licenses expired um and apart from that I object also not just because it's a business practice
that I don't like but also most of these things are not really ebooks they they call them ebooks
because they don't really understand what an ebook is I think to me an ebook is something
that I download a file that I get to keep locally on my device and I can put it on whatever device
I want to and uh I can keep it and so um here's an example this is what the cost of pain theory
book looks like on a phone on the publishers this is course smart which is you know a popular
e-delivery format it's got some good features it's got the table of contents where you can navigate
very easily around the book and everything but can any of you read that my my measuring stick
is can I read it on my phone comfortably without doing a lot of like zooming in it's well I'll zoom
in right hey I can read it now but what's the problem is running all the way off the side of the
screen well maybe I'll turn it sideways or maybe I don't that's for a later time so um that's
an example of an ebook ebook that that I don't think is really an ebook and most of the publishers do
that um and so uh to me that's not really an option uh paper books are still a pretty good option
I mean I I've almost stopped reading paper books because I love my Kindle so much and I always
want to have my book in my pocket on my phone or whatever but paper has some advantages you get to
keep it if you want to you can sell it back if you wanted you could give it to a friend I mean
there's so many great things about uh paper that's the thing I don't like about paper it weighs a
lot this was an issue that they came up and it's you know less of an issue for me because I have
an office I can keep books in and I don't have to lug them all over the place but I don't want my
students to have to tote anybody try to pick up the Oxford uh history of Western music college
edition that is a heavy book it's a very very heavy book um I requested an extra copy from the
publisher so that I could keep one at home and one at the office because I didn't want to carry it
um so I don't like heavy books um so anyway there there were a couple of uh attempts to solve the
problem of expensive textbooks in my counterpoint class the first thing I did was I wrote a workbook
because the workbook was something I felt well I could probably write my own workbook without
too much trouble you need a bunch of cantist premises for them to write counterpoint against it's
not rocket science and so I wrote a workbook I give it to them for free as a PDF and I'm not a
huge fan of PDF but for this purpose it's perfect because what I wanted to do is print it right on
it and turn it in uh and it's free anybody around the world whoever wants it can have it I don't
I don't care it's creative commons license and then for the book that cost 125 dollars said guys
just go find any old edition of this you want and it's fine they they differ only in pagination
and usually not that much in pagination but not at all in content the content is virtual
identical from first through fourth editions and they're plentiful on the use market for
under ten dollars and so uh that work really I mean students uh the problem with that one was
they find out about this on the first day of class and then it's two weeks before they can
get their copy and so what I started to do was collect them myself at the end of the semester
I buy books from the students and uh before long I have like ten copies of it and then
next time I taught the course I say students who you want to you can borrow this book for the whole
semester for twenty dollars give it back to me at the end of the semester you get your twenty dollars
back if they don't give it back I take that twenty dollars and buy another copy of the book and so
that actually worked pretty well students were happy they really didn't have to pay anything
but um it's I still wanted an ebook or something that that I could just provide them for free
and not have to go through that whole thing of um finding books so my new solution
was to track down a public domain counterpoint textbook I found a couple
the first place I looked was Project Gutenberg because that's where I get all the stuff I like to
read for pleasure um old 19th century fiction and stuff like that they had one counterpoint book
that was not really appropriate it was like 40 lessons in counterpoint and it was you know
really thin um it was okay but not really appropriate for my class so went over to archive.org
and found two books by this guy Percy Gurches who published a bunch of books back in the early
part of the 20th century including these two the one that I thought was most appropriate for my class
was exercises in elementary counterpoint and then I also took the other one applied counterpoint
which is much more advanced learning to write fugues and inventions and canons and all that but um
oh and here's the address archive.org if you're incidentally I forgot to mention
I've got a handout I wasn't sure if this conference did handouts I haven't seen very many but I
have a handout and if I ran out then you can like do a QR code and get an online version of
that handout that's much better actually it's got links to all of the stuff I talk about in an embedded
video um so the at archive.org what they have it's a repository of stuff all kinds of stuff audio
video and a lot of books this was an example of what I would call a scan and dump so some library
somewhere has an excellent scanning machine that'll scan a whole book really fast and then it runs
I presume some kind of script that will convert the output of that scan into multiple formats
including things like HTML, plaintext, rtf, pdf, ummobi I mean all kinds of formats and then they
just dump it on the server and so I found that and I downloaded two things the pdf and the e-pub
I wanted the e-pub because when you unpack an e-pub there's HTML in there I like HTML because of
some things I'll talk about in just a moment but so that's what the pdf looked like it's
beautifully scanned I could have just given the pdf to my students and said this is our book
and they probably would have been okay with that it's free they can read it you know they can
download it onto their tablets or computers or whatever however I'm not a big fan of pdf and um
I wanted to make it something a little bit more flexible and so I looked at the e-pub and here's
what I found oh my goodness this is the same page we're just looking at take a look
we see here 17a the interval most to be shown between two and so forth what happened to the
musical examples oh dear um the examples just didn't come out they they end up as
asky gibberish on the screen and so I thought well if I'm going to to make something usable out
of this I've got a lot of work ahead of me and so I decide to try it anyway I mean I could have
just used the pdf but to me this is a pdf that represents a pdf to me because it's it's
it's so static like if you try to view a pdf on an ipad man it looks great it looks great right but
what about my phone with on the phone uh there's the pdf I can't see that it's too little but I
can zoom in right and the same thing happens as on that other thing so I'll turn it sideways hey I
can still read it but then you know you get a few lines at a time um and so what I wanted was
something flexible and that is html to me this represents html a liquid because whatever
container you pour it into it flows to fill it perfectly right that's what html does and so
for the e-book we get something that you might even be able to read from where you're sitting
right there you re-flows all the lines to fit the screen if you can't read it you just change
the font size right that's bigger now you can read that an e-book you you to me it's not any
book if you can't change the font size because and that's that's an accessibility issue and it's
about being able to adapt on the fly to fit whatever screen you're looking at you can also do
something like use a different font face here I've used the open dyslexic font which allegedly
helps dyslexic readers to read a lot more accurately you can't do that on the pdf you can't just
change the font face to me an e-book has to be able to change the font face as well and so
what I did was start to just work through the book the first thing to do of course was to correct
the text so even I mean obviously the musical examples were a wall they weren't there but of course
the OCR doesn't get everything right in the plain text either so first thing to do is just correct
all the text and I did that took a while reading through the text I got a good feel of how the
book was put together to make a book like this work you really have to you have to put in an
infrastructure that makes it possible to do non-linear reading because I mean in a novel of course
you expect someone to just start at the beginning and read all the way to the end don't necessarily
do that in a text book a lot of times you'll need to start on chapter five or you know go here
and there and just jump all over the place and there has to be a suitable HTML infrastructure in
place to make it easy to jump around and so I put that you know I got HTML anchors for all the
chapters for the basic structural unit of this book is the paragraph and it's like like giant
ordered list paragraph one two three all the way through like 250 and he's frequently saying
for more information about this see paragraph 71 or so and so every time he does that there's a
link you tap on that and it goes right there and to me that not doing that would have been ignoring
one of the most fundamental benefits of HTML and so you can see this is what the source code looks
like when I'm done with it you've got hyperlinks on references to the various paragraphs you've got
the image files and here is the killer feature for my book I also thought I was finally going to
address to me the like the most glaring omission from music theory textbooks and that is the play button
there's no play button under the examples in theory books and you might think well what does
that matter I mean a good musician ought to be able to look at that example and imagine it in his
head and like what I mean I can do that I've got a lot of training but my students see that and
they just turn the page and they they don't even look at it and so my task because I thought it was
to create a version of the book where that appears under every single one and so that took some doing
what I did was to well it's a long process however I came up with a workflow that made it doable
I would have given up ages ago if I didn't have certain skills at programming and automating things
and so I decided to use to create the MIDI files a program called lilypons which is listed on
them hand out there lilypons and open source cross platform music notation program that uses
plain text as an input and outputs other stuff images PDFs audio and so the main thing I needed
it for was to create the audio part of my script when I finished a little bit of code that will
create an example it will generate an image which I didn't necessarily use I decided after a while
that I need to do screenshots instead of brand new images for reasons that I'll go into if we got
time but it generates a MIDI file which I then have part of my script convert to MP3 and
org format and it lastly creates a little block of HTML code that when I speak a command zaps
it right into my file and voila I've got a play button and so I got this workflow going where
it allowed me to do these these play buttons fairly rapidly and so I forget where I had
initially thought I was going to read from script and after going to a number of papers I decided
well maybe I'll just go from my slides and I know this topic backwards and forwards because I
of course did it but I'm not sure exactly where I should go next in the discussion because I don't
know what you guys are we're going to be interested in but essentially that's my my process
creating oh the next thing I need to talk about I suppose is how to read this thing so my source
file is HTML and at first I thought I would just put this on my web server and have a great big HTML
page which it has benefits and drawbacks benefit is that all of the hyperlinks and all the audio
works perfectly drawback it's a very very large file size for that page and so loading the page up
on on a desktop it's no problem but on my phone man it took forever not acceptable and so I decided
to convert the HTML format into ebook formats ePub and azw3 for well ePub reads on lots of things
azw3 is for the Kindle the Kindle sadly does not support audio it like you can't put a play
button in here I still want to read that book on my Kindle just because I love my Kindle because
I love the way it looks it still looks like a paper book only it's a little smaller and I can
change the font size and and all that and so I do create Kindle versions even though they don't
have the audio but I also still wanted to have a version that somebody who doesn't have a fancy
smartphone or an iPad can read just on a desktop but still get an ebook experience and that was
I found a tool called monical which is a set of JavaScript that you can put on your web server that
will give you the experience of an ebook and I would be demonstrating this right now if I
did not have the technical difficulty with my laptop but you can go in a web browser Chrome
works best to this one page on my website and the whole book is done in like an ebook reader that's
embedded in my web page and you get to you know it turns pages and you can sometimes change the
fonts if you can manage to click and just the right spot this is not a perfect ebook reader but to
me it's better than trying to load up the giant web page all at once I even use the monical
version on my phone using the Chrome mobile browser and that's my favorite way to look at it on
the phone distribution of the book I mean this is something I would like for anyone who's interested
in a free counterpoint book to use freely do whatever they want with it I'm not interested in
getting any money for it I just wanted to give my students a book for free and anyone is welcome
to get it from my server however I would love to find I guess this is the next step is find
somewhere to give it a home where it be more central more of a more official kind of textbook
place where more people could discover it easier and then just download it freely great thing about
my book is that I mean it's I mean it doesn't really need peer review in terms of content because
it went through like 15 editions on on published by G Shermer and so I mean it's a really good book
the language is a little bit quaint but I kind of like it I like hearing he's sometimes even poetic
you know those guys in the late 19th century wrote in a beautiful way sometimes and so
but I mean you'll occasionally run across some terminology that's a little bit outdated and we
might call things differently but since the book I'm offering does not have any DRM on a digital
rights management just pack it it just open it up and change the words if you don't want
it I wouldn't care and so like what I do instead is like when he starts talking about say the
controversial associate I put a little footnote and say nowadays we call this the counter motive
and boy you could also change it so that any old-fashioned term like shows up in red or something
where was I going with that I I think that's about all I wanted to say about it
Christian yes I have two questions actually yeah it seems like here you can rely on getting a
resource that according to you anyway it's not that fundamentally different from sources that are
commercially available now but would that translate well to your other courses could you
imagine for example finding a harmony textbook that is public domain or even a I think got
a bit of music history right I of course have thought about this a lot and it counterpoint is
particularly well suited for this because what you're learning to do is write in a style that's
200 years old and that style is never going to change now teaching philosophies might change you
know the different approach I mean I just got a brand new counterpoint book a few weeks ago that
came out so people are still publishing new counterpoint books and the reason why I called this
reinvigorating the wheel is because I thought why do we keep doing that I mean counterpoint is so
old we don't need to reinvent the wheel here let's just reinvigorate it by taking this book which
to me is really good and just making it new making it flexible and modern and to me it's actually
better than anything available currently because of the play buttons I mean I had one of my students
in the counterpoint last semester I said Dr. Culp I don't think I've ever even looked at an example
in a textbook before but yours been this is great I can not listen to every single one of them
I think and partly because it's kind of fun you know no it's a it's an MP3 file that's embedded
in the ebook itself it's it's like a generic piano sound but that's something you could
change I mean if if you had access to my source files and I would share them with anybody if
you've got a better MIDI generator than what I was using you could get nicer quality sounds
and one thing that I had thought about doing for the future for for whatever examples in their
are appropriate is to take the recordings done on something like the open well-timber clavier or
the open Goldberg variations this these are you guys familiar with these projects wonderful recordings
by professional pianists that are public domain and you could take some of those cut out just the
right spot and put it in my book right there and have a real professional pianist doing these or
maybe crowdfund a project to hire somebody to do nice studio recordings of every single one of those
the problem with that is it's not it's not scriptable I my my criterion for using like lily pond for the
thing I had to be able to script this because I like for example I realized early on that the file
was getting way too big like it and if I kept going at that rate it was going to be like a 300
megabyte file size which is way too big and so all I had to do was to write a brief shell script
that would just regenerate all the files at a different bit rate and a different width for the
images and it took less than five minutes to regenerate like 600 media files which is something you
can't do unless you're using a tool that is running from the command like you can't do that in
the finale I mean you've got to open up every single file re-export I mean it's it's not doable
yeah you anyone else in this room tried ibooks for creating files like this so ibooks there's a separate
it's i think ibooks university or something something not just the ibooks e-reader but
that enables you for those who don't have programming experience to just create very easily
it's not as customizable as there's something that you can change it's grip but you know maybe
for some people have you used it I've not used that I have used some graphical program like
the the program I used to generate the e-book formats is called calibur and calibur has a graphical
version that's available for mac for linux for windows I at first I was using the graphical one
and that that just was not doable because every time I wanted to update the files and put them on
my website I had to open up calibur bring in the file right click this do choose to format I mean
it was terrible and so I discovered though that calibur has a set of command line tools and so I
wrote a script that would just take my original HTML and generate azw3 e-pub dyslexic azw3 dyslexic
e-pub and then another separate part of script push all the files to my server but I realized
I've got a different skill set than most people I've done sure it's meant to be interactive or
I mean by your active you can put videos and audio and pictures and of course text and I think
I believe it's meant to save in an e-book format or the various e-book formats so I better
would do e-pub it would probably generate an e-pub file though an e-pub can be read on lots of
stuff I tried doing a music history book with it the challenge with it was cross black porn
use for students but I mean it's the time I was doing it and what is it going on now
so I gave a project also the size of the file was absolutely huge
file size can be a problem I mean that by finished this book I've got the real books right here
by the way these two right here this one I think is 56 mags and this one is about 28 mags
in its e-book format and to me that's reasonable yeah okay
because I personally I really I appreciate your care for the students and not spending too much
money and all that but don't ask that advocate part is are you training them to expect to get
the efforts of your labor of my labor yes it's possibly I mean I could I could probably sell it
I I come from an open source background and so I believe very firmly in open learning materials
I realize I'm weird that way and look I think they appreciate it but I'm just
like the whole issue of copyright and you know as music worth paying for sure it is
if somebody wants to pay me as a consultant to help them do that I'm more than willing to charge
them but I I mean for my own students for for this project I want to release it in a free
license I mean I I don't want to me to me re-releasing it with some kind of copy right would defeat
the whole purpose of my project because I want it to be free yeah Chuck you could do that if you
wanted to it's up to you but just realize that people could still come to my website and get it
for free no no I mean it's a public domain book and the source code from all my lily pond files I
made gplv3 which is an open source license that just means that if you make any modifications to
that code you have to share it that's a big there isn't a agreement I'm thinking one of the library
database is that a university is using you know they've hired somebody to do it it was you know
the open source but now they can't go back and get to it because the company that did the
location for the suppose land or open source yeah the the open source licensing is it's kind of a
it's it's a thorny issue if you don't license it just right you could run into the problem you're
talking about right there the gplv3 is one word that requires you to share it like you can't
just close it up after you've done that anything else we are am I the little red light here at the
end of this thing thanks
thank you
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