I designed, built and evaluated a sensorial system for music learning. Music learning traditionally follows a rigorous coaching period which may not be suitable for all learners. Lack of feedback in the initial stages of learning leads to a high rate of fallout, what if the learners could be able to physically play an instrument without knowing how to play, hear the music they create - this would provide encouragement along the way to become a proficient musician.
In this project I built six sensorial systems based on - vibrotactile and transductile feedback with various configurations which take the form of finger attachments. These finger attachments when worn, signal the user sensorially to move their fingers in the correct chord positions for playing a particular musical note.
The subsequent paper discusses a system for haptic music learning. It details the implementations and tests of these six different methods of haptic actuation for the finger. It also explore different factors – cultural, accuracy, comfort, perception that play a role in the effectiveness of different haptic methods. Finally it outlines an entire system based on the Orff Schulwerk for a wearable exoskeleton for exploratory music learning.
The results from this experiment can be found here.
