About eMusicTheory.com

What happened to the free Java™ Music Theory website?

eMusicTheory.com is the next generation version of the old Java Music Theory site that was hosted on a server at Hamilton College. Everything that was available for free on the old site is also free here! This new site does offer some services to subscribers only, but you should not subscribe if you just want to use the music theory drills for practice.

Who are you?

My name is Rob Whelan. I programmed the first music theory drills while I was still a student at Hamilton College. After I graduated in 1998 (with a BA in Music performance and composition), I became a professional software developer, working primarily with internet technologies.

I built the site up bit by bit over the years, working in my spare time to add drills and features, until there were enough subscribers that I could work on it more or less full time.

Are you going to start charging money for using the drills?

Not a chance. Actually, that's one of the conditions I agreed to with the Hamilton College music department; the drills will continue to be freely available to the public, even if I charge for additional services I offer.

How did this whole thing start?

This site has its roots in a series of music theory training exercises that ran on a network of Apple II computers at Hamilton College. When I started classes as a student at Hamilton in 1994, that was all we had to supplement professor-run drills and paper-based homework. They were a little clunky, but the real problem was keeping the computers running - they were simply getting too old.

Professor Sam Pellman (my mentor in composition and electronic/computer music) recreated a few of the drills in the MAX programming language (a drag-and-drop interface on C++, with a focus on musical applications), which ran natively on current Apple computers. They worked well for practice, but they weren't network-aware, and the professors had no way of tracking student scores.

I had already declared a Music major at this point, but I had been taking some computer science courses and learning web design and Java programming. Java was a brand-new language, and it still had a lot of problems, but it was ready-made for use in webpages. I decided to program a Note Reading drill in Java. It worked well, and Sam and I applied for (and got) a grant from the Emerson Foundation so I could spend that entire summer (1997) writing new drills in Java. I also wrote the server-side CGI scripts we needed for Hamilton College students to submit their scores to the server... and the Java Music Theory site was born.

The music department funded my continuing work on the site; I spent the summer after graduation working on more drills and improving the score reporting features. Starting that fall, however, I was employed full-time as a software engineer, so additional work was minimal, in bits and pieces, though the site remained online.

As time passed, though, I continued to receive requests from teachers at other schools, who wanted to be able to track scores like professors at Hamilton could. I also got a lot of requests from users who wanted to be able to use the drills offline, and with MIDI keyboards. Others requested versions of the drills in other languages.

Hamilton College didn't have any reason to pay for this kind of work, and while many of the people writing me said they would be willing to pay for upgrades, I couldn't just start collecting money on an academic website. For the site to be able to grow, it needed a home of its own.

I worked out a license agreement with the college so that I could use the drills in a semi-commercial website, where I could charge for additional services. It took a few years of occasional development after that, but eventually eMusicTheory.com was launched in July of 2003. It might have taken even longer, but Hamilton College decided to upgrade their servers that summer — because of the changes in server-side software, I would have had to rewrite large parts of the old website for it to keep working... instead, I finally got the new site online so that Java Music Theory could be retired gracefully.

Any questions or comments? Feel free to contact me.