Getting the Most From The Piano Education Page

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by

John M. Zeigler, Ph.D.
Piano Education Page Editor-in-Chief
Rio Rancho, NM  USA

he Piano Education Page is a very large site (over 1000 pages of material) with lots of opportunities for interaction. If you're new to the site or you'd just like to cut to the chase regarding its use, read on! We'll quickly sketch some of the most important facts that will help make your visits more productive and fun.

Getting Around | Starting Points | Help! | Reading Articles | Locating Specific Information | Maximizing the Appearance of PEP | Hearing the Music and Sounds | Finding Out More | Forums | Making PEP Your Start Page | Using PEP's Materials | Site Policies | Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) | Piano Education Home

Look for these "key info" graphics; they point out especially important or interesting information!

Getting Around

The Piano Education Page (PEP) Program on the home page and at the left top of every other page on the site, including this one, serves as the entry spot to the whole site. From there you can reach any topic on the site in four clicks or less. PEP uses a consistent set of visual elements to help you move quickly around the over 1000 pages which make up the site. Click on either the underlined text or the graphic associated with it to go to that section. Each sub-page section has a horizontal "Presto!" Menu (like the one above) at the end of the section which provides a handy mini Program for jumps around that page and to other closely related information. One click on the animated "Presto!" of the Presto! Menu will always take you to the top of the current page. A click on your browser's Back button will take you back one page and a click on The Piano Education Page graphic at the very top of the page will move you straight back to the home page.  Below the Program is a section with both special information and links to other related information. Look for the "key info" graphics on the left side of the page; they indicate especially important or interesting information (see at left). If you just want to find out what we think are the most important new additions of the last month, check This Month's Piano Education Page Features section of the home page. If you'd like to know about everything we've added recently, look at the Premiering page. Both these pages are hyperlinked so you can go directly from them to the new information.

Starting Points on The Piano Education Page

We have designed The Piano Education Page to have "something for everybody." We think that most visitors will enjoy exploring nearly every section of the site, but, if you're new to the site, here are some places to start:

Help!

We find that a relatively small number of the same questions regarding piano and music education recur again and again, accounting for in excess of 75% of our e-mail. On our Frequently Asked Questions pages, we have assembled those questions and their answers for fast, easy reference. Chances are good that the answer to your question can be found there or on one of the pages we reference there. If so, it will save you time and effort writing us with your question and waiting for our answer. You can then spend that time practicing the piano! If you can't get your question answered there, it is still highly likely that we've answered it elsewhere on the site. In that event, you can easily find out the answer by going to Search The Piano Education Page. Directions for using that capability are just below.

PEP is very conservatively designed, so our visitors rarely have problems viewing or hearing The Piano Education Page. However, when they do, we're happy to try to help, within the limits of our knowledge, the information available to us and our time constraints. When you report a problem to us, you can save yourself and us a lot of time by giving us some basic information: what computer type you're using (Mac or IBM-compatible), what operating system (Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP or Mac OS), your browser program (for most, Netscape or Internet Explorer) and its version (from the browser Help,About menu). If you're having sound problems and you've established that you can play sound offline, also tell us what type of sound card and speakers you have. Additional information about hearing PEP's music is below. Please note that we cannot solve hardware-related problems; these are best directed to the manufacturer of the hardware or the software running on it.

Reading PEP's Articles

Although all of PEP's pages have a similar visual appearance, it may be somewhat less obvious that they have a similar logical structure, as well. Visitors can use this structure to maximize the efficiency of gaining information from them. Each article on PEP starts with a one or two paragraph summary which sets the context of the article and gives a glimpse of what will be discussed in the following paragraphs. Then follows the main text of the article, in detail. Finally, the article ends with a summary restatement of the article's main points, usually with general tips about how to put that information into practice (no pun intended!).

In practice, this structure allows you to peruse the first paragraph of the article quickly to determine if it is of interest. If not, you can use the links on the page to move on to something more useful. If you're in a hurry, just go to the very end of the article at the bottom of the page and read everything after the last section heading to get the main points. If you're interested in the topic and have the time, read the full article for maximum benefit. You'll find that using the structure of articles on PEP to best advantage will save you lots of time. Maybe you can use that time to look at some of the other 1000 pages of the site!

Locating Specific Information

You can find information by simply surfing the site; in fact, we think you'll find it fun to do that on occasion. Sometimes, though, you may just want to find an article or review quickly without looking at the intervening pages. We've provided several different tools to help you do that.

If you need information on a given topic, just go to the Search The Piano Education Page sub-page. As long as your browser can accommodate HTML forms (the overwhelming majority can), you can use this page to find all the pages which refer to the keywords you supply. You simply type in the keywords (e.g. "piano lesson" or "software") which describe the topic that interests you and press the Search button. You'll get back a list of hyperlinked pages which use that term or terms, ranked in order of estimated relevance to your inquiry. You can then jump directly to the pages from the search output. If you don't get quite what you want from the search, just click your browser's Back button to go back to the form and try again. Full directions and examples are available on the Search page.

If you can't describe your area of interest well with keywords or you just want to get an idea of which documents might be of most interest to you, take a look at The Piano Education Page Score. The Score is a categorization of all the documents on the site by topic type or interest group (parent, teacher, kids, etc). This will give you a better idea of where to look for information on more general topics like teaching piano or finding learning aids. The Score itself is hyperlinked so that you can jump directly from it to any area of the site. Use the Score to find those documents quickly that will most interest you or to get our take on what those new to the site should see.

To see a hyperlinked list of all the document titles on The Piano Education Page, check out the Piano Education Page Table of Contents. The Table of Contents is complementary to the Score; it doesn't show the full structure of the hyperlinks between documents, but does list all the documents by title. It's a good way to get a feeling for what's available on the site, even if you're not looking for anything in particular.

If this text appears in a teal (blue-green) color, your browser supports CSS. If it appears in any other color, your browser does not support CSS.

Maximizing the Appearance of PEP

The Piano Education Page is designed to have a clean look that displays well in most browsers and can be downloaded in a reasonable period of time. Nonetheless, we think you'll find that it looks best in HTML 3.0 compliant browsers like Navigator 3.0 or later, Internet Explorer 3.0 and later for Win95, Win NT and Vista, or Firefox. The proprietary browsers offered by most Internet Service Providers are limited in their capabilities and in the formatting commands they recognize. PEP uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to enforce a consistent look on the whole site and make it visually more interesting. Older or less-capable ISP browsers do not support Cascading Style Sheets. The result is that PEP and most other sites will look worse in most ISP and older browsers. Moreover, there is no requirement to use your ISP's browser. Once you are connected to your ISP, any browser, once properly configured, will generally work. Since you can download modern browsers for free from the links provided above, there is really no reason to use a less capable browser.

Hearing the Music and Sounds

The home page and several of the sub-pages of PEP have background music and sounds built right into them. The background music is changed with every update, so, if you visit regularly, you'll eventually hear a sizable part of the critical piano literature. Each update's background music is chosen around a certain unifying principle (our Listening Focus) to exemplify certain elements of music: period, style, composer, thematic material, etc.

You'll need a sound card, speakers, and a sound-capable browser like Navigator 3.0 or later, Internet Explorer 3.0 and later for Win95 and Win NT or Firefox to hear music on your system. Most modern computers have everything you need in the way of hardware necessary to hear the music. You can also download the MIDI files from The Audition Room sub-page and play them on your home computer later, so long as you have a sound card and speakers in your system. To do that, just right click on the work you want to download, choose Save As.. from the resulting pop-up menu and click OK to save the file to your hard disk. It can then be played by any program capable of playing MIDI files. Chances are your computer has several such programs on it, including those which came with the computer.

You may well find that the music sounds "tinny" on some older systems. Although the MIDI sequences we use have some limitations vis a vis real performances on the acoustic piano, this tinny character is due to your speakers and/or sound card, not the MIDI files. The best advice we can give you to solve that problem is to spend about $50 for a pair of decent computer speakers with a separate sub-woofer. You'll find the quality of the music to be tremendously improved if you do so. Although less important, we have also seen some noticeable differences in the quality of sound from different player programs.

On other systems, the piano music may sound more like a harpsichord than a piano. If your system sounds like this, chances are you have an FM-synthesis, rather than wavetable, sound card. As the name implies, an FM-synthesis sound card generates the sound by adding together simple sine waves of varying amplitude and frequency (Fourier synthesis). A wavetable sound card better duplicates the richness of sound of an acoustic piano because it uses stored samples of piano sound to produce sound. Since wavetable sound cards cost under $50 these days, your best bet is probably to replace your sound card or buy a newer computer with an up-to-date wavetable sound card. If you hear no sound at all on your computer from any program, you probably have a problem with driver configuration or hardware connection which you need to address with your computer or sound card manufacturer.

Visitors often ask why we send MIDI performances of piano music, rather than recordings of actual live performances. While there are some potential copyright issues attending the use of real acoustic piano performances, the main reason we use MIDI files is that they are MUCH smaller in size than even compressed versions of acoustic piano performances. Typically, a MIDI file is a factor of 50 to 100 smaller in size than even a highly compressed (and, hence, somewhat degraded) waveform file. We suspect that few of our users would be willing to wait 45 minutes for a 10 MB acoustic piano performance to download over their 56 K modem when they can get a MIDI performance of the same work in seconds.

We have made a special effort to provide kids with their own Just for Kids sub-page with lots of fun and educational stuff, including background piano music specially chosen for children and different from that on the home page, the Audition Room, or the Listening List and Composer Resource pages. The Kids page also has the Meet The Composer interviews which take the child on a sound-filled trip on a time machine to meet, interview, and hear some of the music of a famous composer in his own milieu. The hardware and software requirements for the Kids page sounds are the same as those for the other pages. Also on the Kids page is a selection of fun sounds which you can download free for playing on your computer.

Finding Out More or Making Suggestions

We are happy to try to answer your questions and to have your input about how we can improve the site. Every constituent page of PEP has one or more links that you can click for more information or to offer comments and suggestions. Just clicking on those links will start your e-mail program and address the e-mail automatically to us. You then just type in your message. In addition, we also have a special Give Us Your Review page, which allows you to utilize either standard e-mail links or HTML forms to correspond with us. Note that, if you use the HTML form method, you MUST supply us with a valid e-mail address, since we cannot reply to your message without it. We try to answer all e-mail within two days of receipt.

The Piano Education Page Message Board

Sometimes you may have a topic about which you would like to ask the other visitors to PEP or would like to share with other visitors and the PEP staff. PEP can help there, too! Just sign in to the PEP Forums. The Board has open forums on a wide variety of topics. You can read small parts of the Board just by going there, but you must register if you would like to post to the Board or read the majority of the forums. As the very soul of a Forums is participation, we think most visitors will find it worth a couple minutes to register. Use of the Board is entirely free; we make no use of the registration information other than for the purposes of running the Board. We do not ask for any personal information, but users should keep in mind that, with some exceptions, material posted to the Board is inherently public. Use the Board if you want to reach a wider audience with your comments or questions; send us a private e-mail if your inquiry is personal or not otherwise amenable to publication. To learn more about the Forums and the way it works, see our Piano Education Page Forums FAQ.

Making The Piano Education Page Your Start Page

If you would like to be kept aware of all the new information that we add every month, or use the site in your studio on a regular basis, or if you just like to listen to the music, there is an easy way to do all those things. Make PEP your browser's start page! It doesn't cost anything and it's easy to do. Once you've done it, your browser will greet you with PEP and its beautiful piano music. Here's how:

Netscape (Navigator or Communicator) Users:

1. In Netscape, click File, Preferences. Choose Navigator by clicking on it.
2. In the resulting window, click on the radio button Navigator Starts With: Home Page. Then in the edit box just below entitled Home Page, fill in the URL for PEP (http://pianoeducation.org)
3. Click OK
4. That's it! Netscape will now load PEP automatically.

Internet Explorer Users:

1. In Internet Explorer, click View, Options. Choose the Navigation tab by clicking on it.
2. In the Customize section of the resulting window, click on the drop down menu (downward pointing arrow) and choose Start Page from the menu. Then in the edit box just below entitled Address, fill in the URL for PEP (http://pianoeducation.org).
3. Click OK
4. That's it! Internet Explorer will now display PEP automatically on start-up.

If you use a different browser, you'll be able to set a start page in similar ways.

Using The Piano Education Page Materials

Everything on The Piano Education Page is available for reading on the Internet by any interested party. We make no charge of any sort for accessing PEP or reading its materials nor do we receive remuneration of any sort for running the site. That said, we remind you that PEP is copyrighted in the U.S. and most foreign countries and, as such, cannot be indiscriminately copied or reproduced without risk of very large civil penalties, including paying attorney costs for any infringement action.

Nonetheless, in keeping with the educational goals of PEP, we allow any visitor to make a single, personal use hard copy of any part or parts of PEP royalty-free. You need not request our permission to make a hard copy for your own personal, non-commercial use. Similarly, other sites may link The Piano Education Page without our explicit permission, though we are always happy to have other site owners notify us of links to The Piano Education Page. Copying or reprinting PEP in whole or in part in any other circumstance without advance permission from us is absolutely forbidden.

Teachers often ask us if they can reproduce multiple copies of parts of PEP for use in educational settings. Again, we generally allow limited, royalty-free, educational-use reprinting of parts of PEP, subject to certain conditions and limitations. If you would like to use hard copies of PEP with your students, consult our page Reprinting from The Piano Education Page for instructions and conditions. We also allow conditional use of graphics from our Downloadable Musical Graphics page on Web sites, newsletters, and educational brochures. You can find the conditions and procedures for doing that on Reprinting from The Piano Education Page.

The Piano Education Page represents literally thousands of hours of work by many talented individuals. We enforce our copyrights on the site vigorously, both to protect the integrity of the site as an educational, non-commercial resource and to preserve our legal rights as authors. Individuals whose intended use of PEP's material is commercial in nature or beyond the conditions and limitations we place on royalty-free reprinting must contact us regarding licensing.

Site Policies

Running a site as large as PEP takes a lot of time and effort dealing with a wide range of topics and issues. To help our visitors understand how we run the site, we have prepared an extensive Site Policies page. It's the best place to check if you have general questions about topics like how we manage PEP, deal with e-mail and privacy issues, and choose sites to link, among many others.