tl;dr version:
@dale1 What would you think of guitar tab embedded in the text?
Longer version…
Only 19 days later?
Feels like it’s been longer.
Because I ended up in quite the rabbithole. About scores, alternative notations, etc.
To backtrack a second and get to Dale’s question about downloading the score or MIDI files…
The easiest solution would probably be a ZIP file and, as @apurva said, that team has been working on such a download. If it’s a significant effort for that team, then maybe something can be done so that other Open Educational Resources in music could easily share useful resources with learners.
Sounds to me like the best solution would be to, somehow, embed the files in a way which makes them available in all the offline versions. For PDF, that might be extra challenging except for images.
For EPUB3, though, since it’s HTML5, there are some neat possibilities.
For instance, as I posted in the PB issue tracker, last night, this sounds promising:
cifkao/html-midi-player: Play and display MIDI files on the web (github.com)
It’s JavaScript, so it shouldn’t be too hard implementing in PB, including in EPUB3.
Here’s an example:
HTML MIDI Player Basic Example (codepen.io)
It supports both staff notation and something much simpler which could probably help a lot: a “pianoroll”.
Then again, for this specific book on sight-reading for guitar, the best solution would probably be guitar tab representation, no?
And that’s technically much easier to pull off than standard notation.
My guess is that it’s also easier to make accessible.
Speaking of which, during a BCcampus about accessibility and Universal Design for Learning, I asked about anyone working on music and someone linked back to here:
Alt text for music notation? - Help & Questions / OER Creation - Rebus Community
So, branching out from this discussion of downloading scores, I’m obsessed with these ideas of making musical learning as inclusive as possible. Including in terms of cognitive abilities and social identities…
Sooooo…
I hope the team for this specific book can find a proper solution to make things as easy as possible for them. And I’ll continue on my quest for “generalized solutions”.