Project's approach

Educational approach

Content and structure

Technical approach

Traditionally, learning to play a musical instrument is done by regular lessons with a teacher, interleaved with daily practicing hours at home. IMUTUS goal will not be to completely replace traditional music tuition but rather to reinforce and supplement it, by combining it with a more dynamical approach where knowledge is acquired through the students’ active participation, interaction and communication.

The use of computers and new technologies opens a range of new possibilities. Obtaining precise and immediate feedback in the form of visual clues, having constant computer-aided assistance during practice, and remote personal assistance through distance learning connections are just some of the possibilities. High interactivity and engaging game-style exercises will be used to turn the educational procedure into fun, especially for certain tedious tasks involved during practice.

Educational Approach

IMUTUS will support learning through observation, practice and communication.

Observation

In learning by observation the student takes a rather passive role following theory presentations and application examples. These theory presentations will include general issues about music and topics about the selected traditional instrument, the recorder, and will address pupils of beginning to intermediate level. They will not seek to be complete and to cover the aspects of music theory, music reading and writing, and music performance exhaustively. The main goal of the theory presentations will be to provide the necessary background for successfully coping with the exercises and will present a useful source of information for the pupil to refer to when necessary. Thus, it is the exercises that will drive the preparation of the theory lessons. Experienced music tutors will undertake this task.

Theory lessons will be based on multimedia presentations supported by text, audio, images, video and 3D representations of fingering when appropriate. The additional ability of the teachers to create and upload new content to the server in the form of new lessons and/or additional exercises/games, is a strong feature rendering IMUTUS an open platform and allowing the teachers to actively involve and adapt the system to the actual students’ needs. Different paths/courseware could be established to customize various courses according to certain educational and didactical needs.

The use of virtual reality and 3D representations can be quite effective for the student to observe and comprehend the correct fingering, the movement of the hands, and the positioning of the instrument between the lips. This is further enhanced by the capability to freely navigate in the scenery and to zoom in and out in order to obtain different observation viewpoints and focus on performance aspects considered more difficult.

Practice

In learning by practice the student is actively involved. The exercises will mainly consist of a reference musical piece (e.g. in the form of a MIDI file, a standard recording, and a musical score) and will be used as reference material for the training of the students.

The student performance is evaluated either objectively or subjectively. Objective evaluation is performed by a module that provides high level feedback focusing on different aspects of the students’ performance according to their skill level. The type and content of the feedback will also intend to stimulate the student to go on. Subjective evaluation will be performed by a remote teacher who responds to performances that students submit through the web providing comments and instructions.

The automatic objective performance evaluation combined with the option to play a certain part and then listen to and compare the own performance with the performance by a teacher, significantly contribute to student self-assessment and identification of weak points that require further practice. It would be desirable for the system to automatically adapt to the specific strong points and weaknesses of students, altering the default didactical path and suggesting alternative personalized learning paths, revisiting of a theory lesson, a follow-up exercise, etc.

Learning to play a musical instrument resides to a very large degree in practice. Special care will be devoted to rendering the practice process enjoyable and effective. Interactive games may also contribute to this end. Students are naturally attracted to them, and the desire to perform well on the games may provide an additional motivation for practicing.

The exercises will be organized in levels of increasing difficulty to meet the evolving needs of the different students. Experienced music tutors from the Experts Group will select the musical pieces which are suitable for the education of students from beginning to intermediate level.

Adopting an open approach, IMUTUS will provide the means and tools for the teachers to prepare and upload new exercises.

IMUTUS will be offering a very simple environment for basic music editing and composition by means of a simplified and intuitive graphical editor. This will allow the students to express and develop their creative abilities, through creating and listening to their simple compositions. The editing feature will enable the students to listen to changes in pitch or note values made in the score acoustically. In this manner, an immediate realization of basic musical elements is obtained by direct interaction with the system.

Communication

The distance learning features of IMUTUS will enable learning through communication. The students’ ability to communicate with the teachers or with other students through chatting, forums and email, to express their questions, to assess their skills, to exchange and share simple compositions, promote collaborative learning through cooperation.

Content and Structure

The educational content will consist of theory presentations, exercises and games. Experienced music teachers will undertake the task of the collection, preparation and arrangement of the required material.

The development of an efficient practice environment for the recorder is one of the key objectives of IMUTUS and also the base of its innovation and the highest of its technological and educational challenges. Therefore, the content development efforts will be centered around the construction of an adequate corpus of exercises (musical pieces) for practicing.

Thus, theory presentations will be confined to the material necessary for successfully coping with the exercises and will present a useful source of information for the pupil to refer to when necessary. Considering the wide availability of existing software and web resources for teaching different aspects of music theory (music fundamentals, music reading and writing etc.) this choice is fully justified. Moreover, delivering an open platform, IMUTUS will enable educational units to be dynamically inserted, allowing the content to be continuously augmented.

The provided theory presentations will include general issues about music and topics about the selected traditional instrument, the recorder. They will be appropriately arranged to address pupils of beginning to intermediate level in the age of 9-14 years old.

High interactivity and engaging games will be used to turn the educational procedure into fun, especially for certain tedious tasks involved during practice, making the practice process more enjoyable and effective.

The language of the content and the user interface is very important, especially for the students of the target age. Therefore, both the educational content and the environment will need to be available in the students’ own language. In its design, IMUTUS will take provisions to support multiple languages. This will enable it to access wider audiences. With 12 official languages that are soon to grow to 19 in the EU alone, solid support for large multiples of natural languages is simply necessary at all levels of learning technology. One language will be selected as the primary language for the project.

The philosophy behind the instructional design of IMUTUS will be the creation of an environment in which the material is presented visually and aurally, and which allows a great degree of student interaction and participation.

The learning environment will consist of a logical sequence of chapters designed to establish, strengthen, and extend the application of a number of musical concepts mainly through the actual practicing on the recorder. The content will cover the first years of recorder teaching, i.e. beginner to intermediate level.

Each chapter will contain a number of educational units (i.e. theory presentations and exercises), following an increasing level of difficulty. The goal of each theory presentation will be well defined as well as the prerequisites. A set of exercises and games will accompany each lesson to consolidate the material covered. The course will be internally consistent both in terms of content and in terms of the presentation style, covering the whole range of basic playing techniques.

A “Table of Contents” will provide the suggested didactical path and will represent a typical course for the lessons and the related exercises. The students will have the option either to follow it sequentially or to directly jump to any chapter or unit that they wish to follow.

In addition to the suggested didactical path structure, the possibilities of designing a content profiling scheme based on a set of basic technical and musical skills will be examined. Each theory presentation or exercise could be graded in terms of each of these basic skills, resulting in a corresponding characteristic vector that reflects the necessary competences involved.

Such a profiling mechanism could be employed to measure the completeness of the tuition content (especially for the skills covered by the exercises which are of primary importance to IMUTUS) through the use of “knowledge matrices”. Such matrices project each unit of the content to the basic skills vector, correlating the degree to which the mastering of each basic skill contributes to the successfully coping with a musical piece or exercise.

Using a similar scheme (a basic skills vector) to represent the current skill level of the students, IMUTUS could be able to propose personalized learning paths, suggesting the revisiting of specific theory topics, follow-up exercises etc., and orienting the students to content that focuses on the skills they mostly need.

Additionally, teachers will be given the option to customize the flow of the courses depending on their specific preferences, and the progress of their students providing the means for custom learning paths.

Appropriately organized tests consisting of a set of exercises/games will be used to periodically evaluate students’ learning and assess their progress.

Technical Approach

The over-all lifecycle of the project will follow the evolutionary development approach, characterized by the planned development of multiple prototype releases. All phases of the life cycle are executed to produce a release. The evolutionary development approach will permit the user experience to refine and complete the requirements and to reveal requirements that could not be identified in advance. Intermediate prototypes can be used to initiate early evaluation and validation activities. This will enable an efficient utilization of the validation results in the development process and will significantly contribute in keeping the project user-centered by keeping end-users highly involved during the design and development of IMUTUS. Moreover, critical issues usually encountered during integration will also be addressed at an earlier stage of the project allowing for adopting more efficient and well planned solutions.

To meet the educational and technological objectives set forth and to provide the described functionality, a set of modules and components will be developed and integrated:

	Music Recognition Module, to appropriately handle the user input  through the microphone, i.e. the user performance.
	Score Follower/Matcher, to infer the current position of the student  performance in a musical score and aligned the student performance  to the reference score.
	Musical Score Processing modules, including a Score Viewer, a Score  Editor and support for MusicXML importing and exporting.
	Performance Evaluation Module, assessing the level of the user  performance based on measured (“objective”) criteria by comparing  the student’s performance to a “target” performance.
	Optical Music Recognition Tool, enabling the user to scan and convert  available printed musical scores to MusicXML format.
	Virtual Reality Tools, including a Fingering Viewer Module to display  correct fingering and execution of a musical piece, as well as a  dedicated Movement Authoring Tool to author animations implanting  comments and selecting different viewing angles. The operation of these  tools will be assisted by a Music Notation to Hand Positioning mapping  component.
	Distance Learning Tools, for providing students with assistance by  remote teachers, access to remote content repository, communication etc.
	Front-End Environment, integrating the separate modules into an  operative prototype.
	Content Authoring Tools, providing teachers with the means to create  new educational units (theory, exercises and tests)