Objectives

The main educational objectives of IMUTUS will be to assist:

Self-directed learning: The students will be free to decide what musical pieces to practise on and which material to study, when and how, using IMUTUS’ learning possibilities at home. Using the distance learning features of IMUTUS, the students will be able to benefit from a periodic communication with a remote teacher providing assistance and direction.

Teacher-guided learning: After a traditional teaching session, the teacher will suggest to the students which material (practise or theory) to study at home or in the lab using IMUTUS. Different exercises from IMUTUS may be assigned the different students depending on their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Teaching process: Music teachers will be able to use IMUTUS as a teaching supplement in the classroom using predefined educational scenarios, both for teaching basic elements of theory (using IMUTUS as lecture aid), and for monitoring and examining the progress of students with an objective tool.

The environment and content will be designed to support learning by observation, learning by practise, and learning through communication and collaboration emphasising on self-assessment. Mechanisms for tracking the user activity will be developed to allow tuning of the content according to pedagogical consideration.

The introduction of technological tools including objective performance evaluation, distance learning and virtual reality, will allow for the definition and experimentation with new teaching practices in music enriching the traditional procedures.

Technologically innovative components and tools that are necessary to promote the educational objectives set by IMUTUS will be implemented. The system will be based on both audio / optical recognition technology for the transformation of acoustic signals / musical scores to MIDI format, objective performance evaluation and multimedia technology for the definition of an innovative environment for music tuition.

The main goal is reached through the following component objectives:

Enhancement of audio recognition techniques for audio to MIDI conversion. These techniques will be adapted to the recorder, but they can also be extended to other monophonic traditional instruments.

Objective performance evaluation identifying errors and mistakes in the performance, ranking the prominence of the errors/mistakes, and providing guidelines and practice tips to correct them

Design and development of multilingual music tuition courseware including exercises (musical pieces and games) and theory presentations

Extension of available optical music recognition techniques for handling more complicated musical scores

Score viewing/editing for displaying the piece to be studied along with annotations giving the feedback from the objective performance evaluation. The basic score editor will also allow the student to create/edit simple scores.

Support for virtual reality to display correct fingering and visualise errors.

Multilingual front-end environment to provide integrated access to the system functionality

Dissemination and exploitation activities to ensure project visibility and market-oriented planning

Validation and assessment of the system

The project shall take into account the possibility to adopt consolidated standards for the formats/parts that will not be implemented for research purpose. The formalisation used, the mechanisms and tools that will be developed during the project could be based on existing standards. These will provide the basis for defining emerging standards for music tuition. Key aspects are: formalisation of courses and their evolution, scoring, 3D hand visualisation, animation of hands according to the music evolution and natural movements.