Joko Triyono in biographyinstitute.com

The Essence of an enjoyment and fun should not be extinguished, when the platform is changed. That was his basic idea on creating of computerized Virtual Gamelan, the application which he used to be a tutorial kit on teaching of Ethnical Music to the students of State High School of Prembun, Kebumen of Central Java, Indonesia.

“its about the platform how to attract the students on learning our valuable cultural heritage of ethnic musics. The reason for me to choose the multimedia technology is because of its attractiveness for the kids.” Joko Triyono said. “Today, Online Virtual Game changed those kids interaction between them, that’s why I create this Virtual Gamelan.” He added.

This high school teacher’s creation on ethnical music teaching was so interesting. The Gamelan music performance that commonly performed with a set of physical equipment and occupied some space to setup, has now made a simple installable application to your PC, in a 3,5 Mega bytes of Macromedia Flash. Even you can save it in a small USB flash storage, and bring along anywhere you go. Just a finger size.

You’re no longer necessary buying a thousands dollars music equipment, or weighed down of loading some hundred kilos of logs and bronzes set. In brief, this creation make those students found a simple way even to learn themselves on Gamelan. This would simply encourage kids love their way learn ethnic music, just like doing fun online games now no longer a new stuff to them, even to villagers’ kids.

Joko Triyono actually already developed this Virtual Gamelan since 2006, which then winned him some Silver and Bronze Prize of Teachers Creation 2006 Award venued by Education Department of Indonesia. But, because he never published his works since then, his Virtual Gamelan didn’t got popular among the music students. One another reason is he hasn’t got any affordable copy rights security application to protect his works.

He encouraged to develop his Virtual Gamelan because the reason of limited budget the school has is not enough to afford the real Gamelan instruments. “Though, we know Gamelan is one of syllabus, but we can not provide it just because we don’t have those real musical instruments.” Joko said.

He and wife, Sri Jatmawati began to record all those elements of traditional Karawitan instruments into digitalized database. The musical instruments which they borrowed from nearby Elementary Schools around the Kabekelan village of Prembun county, Kebumen city, Central Java. Sounds pitching were made one by one for all tones of the instrument. They both were seriously doing the “big” job, and could finished them in three months. His skills and knowledge in multimedia made benefit to this works, which delivered in Macromedia Flash formatted.

To developed this Virtual Game, Joko has divided it into two different ways of lessons. The first part is presented in musical preference, pelog and slendro partiture, and Gamelan Orchestra. The second part is Gamelan quizzes, a sort of musical game. All those part came into 8 megabytes in size. Small enough to deliver. But still he downsized it into 3,5 megabytes, came with Orchestral elements and musical game.

His Works on Other Ethnical Musics
Lately, Department of Education came to him for another big job. Kolintang and Angklung are the next projects for him to digitalized. In the meantime, he regularly given speech on seminars about Multimedia Learning, over the counties in Central Java. Other than working in traditional music developments, he happen already developed some educational subjects in multimedia. He had already worked on Biology, Sociology, Geography, Astronomy, and Vulcanology, all presented in multimedia visualization.

The objective of this works is to let students absorbed it easily all those education materials, compares to merely on readings. “There are so many abstract explanations on those lesson materials, sometime made the students misinterpretated them.” Joko said.

Even he already copy righted all his works, still he unencouraged to publish them. This because he hadn’t yet afford a protector software to save them. “Let this works dedicated to my students, for now.” He said.