Mobile music touch: mobile tactile stimulation for passive learning

  • Authors:
  • Kevin Huang;Thad Starner;Ellen Do;Gil Weiberg;Daniel Kohlsdorf;Claas Ahlrichs;Ruediger Leibrandt

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Universiaet Bremen, Bremen, Germany;Universitaet Bremen, Bremen, Germany;Universitaet Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Mobile Music Touch (MMT) helps teach users to play piano melodies while they perform other tasks. MMT is a lightweight, wireless haptic music instruction system consisting of fingerless gloves and a mobile Bluetooth enabled computing device, such as a mobile phone. Passages to be learned are loaded into the mobile phone and are played repeatedly while the user performs other tasks. As each note of the music plays, vibrators on each finger in the gloves activate, indicating which finger is used to play each note. We present two studies on the efficacy of MMT. The first measures 16 subjects' ability to play a passage after using MMT for 30 minutes while performing a reading comprehension test. The MMT system was significantly more effective than a control condition where the passage was played repeatedly but the subjects' fingers were not vibrated. The second study compares the amount of time required for 10 subjects to replay short, randomly generated passages using passive training versus active training. Participants with no piano experience could repeat the passages after passive training while subjects with piano experience often could not.