A science of e-learning involves the scientific investigation of how people learn in electronic learning environments. This paper reports about experiments carried out with OPEN SoundS, which is a musical environment designed and developed as a virtual studio where students and teachers from all over the world, can create collaborative musical projects. The main aim is to uphold a strong level of motivation. The results are two-fold: firstly, students achieved better results in the area of music technology and in the area of theory, analysis and composition; secondly, e-learning strategy is superior to the traditional learning method in terms of learning motivation.