A Social Timeline for Exchanging Feedback about Musical Performances

This paper describes work in progress on the development of a social timeline that aims to enrich feedback for people learning music within an online community. This interface is novel because it uses multiple layers for group discussions rather than the single layer found in websites such as SoundCloud. Multilayered timelines are commonly used for audio and video editing, but have not been used for collaborative annotation of music recordings (to avoid confusion we refer to the timeline as multi-layered not multi-track which normally refers to multiple audio channels). We tabulate key features of 15 competing systems to justify our claim that the multi-layered social timeline is a novel design pattern for exchanging feedback about musical performances. 49 classical music students used a prototype of the system over five months to upload and discuss rehearsals of an ensemble piece which was then publicly performed. Data from this study is currently being analysed so only a preliminary indication of results is given.