RiverfrontSouth.com, LLC, a website company, started with a hand-coded HTML website on music improvising, in 2005, from a location along the Petaluma River, in California. We wanted to share our knowledge of creative music composition and improvising. Originally a .com, that first site is now a .net domain, CreativeMusicWorks.net.
Before 2008, publishers were offering sheet music with CDs, for play-along by instrumentalists. CD play-along recordings would have been ideal for self-teaching, but the vast number of amateur musicians could not play at the speed of the CD recordings. In 2008, digital music technology became available in the form of the TASCAM Trainer, produced by TEAC Corporation. The Trainer was a device which could slow down music recordings without changing pitch. With the TASCAM Trainer, musicians could practice with professional recordings, but at the most appropriate playing speed for their ability levels. This new technology greatly expanded opportunities for self-teaching in the form of playing along with a professional recording.
In 2023, the TEAC Corporation discontinued the last of the wonderful TASCAM Trainers which inspired the RiverfrontSouth group of websites.
Music publishers now issue teaching recordings in several tempi, or include software which allows changes of tempo for play-along purposes.
Software capable of slowing down music without changing pitch remains available, and we’ve explored a free open source version of such software with our site, WhatIsAudacity.net.
We’ve expanded on the self-teaching theme in the form of article curation. We’ve gathered short articles into groups on single topics, to promote depth of content, at Science15.com.
In summary, we’re serving that segment of the Internet community which thrives on self-teaching, through a more involved, in-depth experience. Such experiences, led by curiosity, can result in a uniqueness of understanding that is a hallmark of being self-taught.
Photo attribution: By Robert Campbell [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
This photo by Robert Campbell (attribution below) is an aerial view of Petaluma, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. The Petaluma River flows through the center of the city and empties into San Pablo Bay about 12 miles (19 km) in the distance. This photograph shows only about one third of the city. View is to the southeast.
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