Collaborative Playalong Practices in Online Music Lessons: the MusiCoLab Toolset

In the realm of music education, backing tracks serve as accompaniments that complement instrument performance, by adding depth and context to the music being practiced. For genres like jazz, blues and ethnic that are inherently improvisational, backing tracks become indispensable tools acting as a canvas upon which musicians can freely paint their melodies, riffs, and solos. This article presents the development of PAT, a versatile web application that seamlessly integrates practices for synchronous collaboration and asynchronous teacher/student interaction. The application offers capabilities for the automatic analysis of backing tracks to retrieve their rhythmic and harmonic content, for playing-along the backing track and layering the solo recordings of teacher/student performances (overdubbing), for allowing to produce a mix-down of selected tracks and finally for using the recorded performances or the mix-down as the newly backing track. The article presents our efforts for collecting the requirements of music instructors for play-along music practices, our design and implementation approach, as well as an informative pilot assessment guiding our ongoing and future developments.