Lohengrin TimeMachine: Musicological Multimedia Made with MELD

Abstract

Music and the scholarship around it can be challenging to present in the forms associated with books and articles – primarily linear and with an emphasis on the static and visual over the sonic and interactive. We introduce the Lohengrin TimeMachine, a multiple-path multimedia app, optimised for a touch-screen tablet. The app offers two essays about motifs in the opera – one in textual form, and one a 30-minute video. These linear narratives are supported by audio examples, along with dynamic links that take the reader into a fully-interactive exploration of the occurrence of motifs across the opera. The reader’s journey is supported with recorded music and scores, as well as novel visualisations of the orchestration and the timeline of the opera. The app is designed to operate over standards-based web documents published online, with extension and reuse in mind. In this paper, we describe the app, its underlying technology, and the journeys it supports.