Timeline Music Education: Database Technology for the Future

Timeline Music Education (TME) is a bold new pedagogy, which moves data (text, graphics, voice commentary, and animation) to important nodes on the music timeline. The aim is to wean the music listener from depending on copious information provided before or after the music timeline, for musical meaning. The central feature is the Listenology Laboratory where data is shared knowledge, created on the music timeline and with the input of the expert. This paper will deal exclusively with the data collection and storage principles practiced in a test course between 2000-2008 at the Singapore Management University. It will also survey other work and literature in this area - though this is meager. More importantly, this paper will make a case out for the way databases could look like in the future, working within a world observatory for the sonic environment, which is a system of inter-connected Listenology laboratories that model, measure and monitor emissions from sonic emitters (radio, television, recordings and performances) and in the process collect and retrieve, process and store, timeline music data on a new principle and on an international scale. TME brings into confluence music education, musicology/ethnomusicology and music technology, and gels them into a single tool for the training of the music listener – the largest part of the music chain - one that has gone unnoticed and unskilled for a long time.