Interfaces for Music Theory Education

Digital learning becomes relevant for music education when distant learning comes into play. Text based activities such as musicology or music theory come first into mind when it comes to transferring learning content into the digtial realm. Nethertheless adequate interaction for music related tasks are not widely available (such as a web-based score editor or proper sound processing). Also, many available score and musical editors are mostly developed for proficient users. Using HCI Methods, researching and working on interfaces can reduce the cognitive load for students and support musical and tool learning.

For this we develop interfaces and lightweight applications for Learning Management Systems or other interactive setups. These not only should be applicable to desktop workstations, but also for smaller devices, as the use of tablets and smartphones gets more common in learning activities. Therefore, one goal will be to improve usability and technical acceptance.

Using a score editor might be as easy as using a text editor, since it resembles the most natural way how musicians interacted with written music for the last 300 years (Common Western Music Notation, CWMN).

Annotation in the VerovioScoreEditor

One could think further of how to incorporate current and future music practical assessing techniques in a student and teacher convenient way.

Of course, CWMN is just a start point from which we can build towards different kinds of notation supporting contemporary music and ethnomusicology. Also, many Music Information Retrieval Techniques are available which could help to visualize aspects of the learning process (acoustical and musical features, learning improvement, etc.)

Such endeavors are already practiced since 2013 with the detmoldmusictools which provide a wide variety of tools for assessing musical knowledge and also preparing future students for application test.

This project funded by the „Digitale Hochschule NRW“ and will be sustainable and sharable through an open source license.