Last modified: Thursday, January 15, 2009 4:31 PM EST George Litterst, owner of TimeWarp Technologies. (Staff photo by Rick Foster) Beautiful Web music BY RICK FOSTER SUN CHRONICLE STAFF REHOBOTH George Litterst teaches piano students at a Yamaha piano in his comfortable den. But if he wished, he could mentor students in Africa, Russia or the Aleutian Islands almost as easily, and without so much as making a phone call. That's because Litterst and his company, TimeWarp Technologies, devised software that lets piano teacher and student communicate across unlimited distances using the Worldwide Web. Teachers and students hear and see each other using a MIDI-equipped digital piano and a common videoconferencing program. And thanks to a sophisticated array of computerized functions, a teacher can converse with a student, see what keys he or she is playing and observe their hand and body positions. Using a matched pair of electronic pianos, Litterst can even illustrate a technique by playing on his student's keyboard and making the keys on the student's instrument move in real time, despite a separation of thousands of miles. Although distance-teaching using videoconferencing methods has been used previously for music instruction, Litterst's soon to be released software represents a quantum leap that could cancel the distance between a Native American piano student in Nome, Alaska, and a teacher on Cape Cod while still providing a realistic, "in person" experience. "There's nothing out there that comes close to what we're able to do," Litterst said of the new Internet MIDI software set to be released later this winter. Litterst's firm also developed and markets Home Concert Xtreme and Classroom Maestro, electronic programs that help piano students develop on their own. The software can provide accompaniments and visual queues, automatically slow down or speed up to match a student's skill level and enable pupils to quickly go back over difficult passages. During a recent visit by a reporter, Litterst and a teaching colleague in Denver, Colo., each played musical passages via the Web. On a keyboard displayed on Litterst's laptop computer, keys played by Litterst were illuminated in red while his students' appeared in blue. All the time, the two teachers and their pianos were visible to each other on their laptop computers. Litterst's product represents the latest development of a growing convergence between music and technology that is making it easier than ever to collaborate without regard to distance. During the 1960s, Robert Moog developed a synthesizer that made it possible for one musician to electronically reproduce the sounds of nearly any instrument or combination of instruments. The development of the Musical Instrument Device Interface (MIDI) made that information portable, allowing computerized music to be shared with others or stored for later playback. With the addition of the Internet, the potential for sharing musical ideas ballooned almost beyond limit. To reproduce as closely as possible the experience of an in-person lesson, Litterst wedded MIDI technology to the Internet. Capturing a student's performance with a microphone, then compressing and transmitting via Internet or telephone would would result in considerable distortion. Instead, Internet MIDI breaks down the music into digitized bits that is transmitted as code via the Internet, then read and reassembled into music on the recipient's keyboard. "You can think of it in terms of a piano roll, which player pianos used to reproduce music," Litterst said. "This is essentially a more sophisticated, digital version." A common videoconferencing software, Skype, provides the video companion for Internet MIDI. Litterst says there are some facets of a lesson Internet MIDI can't reproduce. "For instance, you couldn't reach over and correct somebody's hand position," he said. Other than that, though, the technology represents an advancement that could help bring music instruction into remote areas or allow a student in one location to conceivably study with masters anywhere in the world. Litterst also sees potential for baby boomers, many of whom are redicovering their passion for music decades after their last childhood recitals. Piano lessons aren't the only place where technology is revolutionizing music. Professional and amateur musicians are also using the Web to collaborate by logging on to social-networking sites, such as Indaba Music, to record with musicians using their own home computers. Users can sign up free of charge and even use the site's audio editing tools and shop from among 100,000 collaborating musicians in more than 175 countries. Shana Kirk, the piano teacher in Denver, recently used Litterst's product to help a fellow teacher prepare her class for a recital. "The weather was bad, so it was hard to get around," she said. So Kirk worked individually with the children to get them ready. Her students were 2,000 miles away - in Massachusetts. Kirk, who works with Litterst to market his music software products, says she's received a favorable response from other teachers. "It's surprising how much support we've received from teachers," she said. "At first, we thought they might feel threatened." Instead the program, which will be the subject of a major demonstration at the Music Teachers National Association convention in March in Atlanta, Ga., is being embraced as a tool for enhancing students' learning. "I don't think we're about to replace the teacher," she said. Additional information about TimeWarp's products are available at www.timewarptech.com.