A Sheffield based media company has created a prototype Web project that tells the story behind classical music using a combination of HTML 5 and Javascript.

Mudlark's Orchestrated Text lends a context for "Winter" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. As the page loads and the music begins to play, descriptive text emerges that aims to deepen the listener's experience. It explains how the discordant notes and melodies are used to evoke Vivaldi's vision of snow, winds, and winter scenes.

The project's creator, Richard Birkin, began coding the project wrapped up in a blanket over Christmas. Having worked on a pitch for a classical music label that utilized the brand's album sleeve notes accompanying each CD or vinyl, Birkin set out on creating his own project. He wanted to make a webpage that brought together the music and content notes of classical CDs, enhancing the listener's experience without the hassle of creating and editing a video.

While Birkin found that javascript animations running alongside music would suffice on a local level but as soon as the pages were put on a server the javascript would load instantly, falling out of sync with the music while it buffered.

Undeterred, he found a solution in the form of an HTML5 animation, Chell in the Rain for Portal 2.

"It was a sort of delicate doddle," Birkin told Wired.co.uk. "The code that I began with was written by Nick Catalano and Matt Merkle for their Portal 2 site. I'm not an expert in Javascript, but it was easy to grasp the timing triggers, animation sequences, and 'lyrics' and go from there. The hardest part was setting up the run of animations, and resequencing if I decided to add a new line in after I'd already progressed beyond it."

As the page loads the song, each piece of the text is queued up with a time and animation instruction. As the audio track reaches each timing, the browser renders the text according to the animation instruction.

The text is based on the Deutsche Grammophon "La Gran Musica" series of CDs and books, which aim to familiarize the listener with the imagery of the music and the purpose of each instrument and orchestral movement.

Despite only being a prototype, Orchestrated Text has been well received by classical music fans. "I've not seen a lot of digital experiences aimed squarely at classical music aficionados," said Birkin. "So to steer this in that direction would be brill. It would be great to have a level of content that's interesting and valuable to advanced music students, too."

Wired.co.uk recommends you pop in some headphones and head over to the Orchestrated Text page for three minutes of chilled out listening/reading. Does the text add to your experience of the music? Let us know what you think in the comments below.