What Early User Involvement Could Look Like—Developing Technology Applications for Piano Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Numerous technological solutions have been proposed to promote piano learning and teaching, but very few with market success. We are convinced that users’ needs should be the starting point for an effective and transdisciplinary development process of piano-related Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (TaHIL) applications. Thus, we propose to include end users in the initial stage of technology development. We gathered insights from adult piano teachers and students through an online survey and digital interviews. Three potential literature-based solutions have been visualized as scenarios to inspire participants throughout the interviews. Our main findings indicate that potential end users consider posture and body movements, teacher–student communication, and self-practice as crucial aspects of piano education. Further insights resulted in so-called acceptance requirements for each scenario, such as enabling meaningful communication in distance teaching, providing advanced data on a performer’s body movement for increased well-being, and improving students’ motivation for self-practice, all while allowing or even promoting artistic freedom of expression and having an assisting instead of judging character. By putting the users in the center of the fuzzy front end of technology development, we have gone a step further toward concretizing TaHIL applications that may contribute to the routines of piano teaching and learning.

Evaluation Strategy of the Piano Performance by the Deep Learning Long Short-Term Memory Network

“…m is the predicted value of piano performance evaluation. The model training loss function is shown in equation (8) as follows:…”

“…During this period, the piano teacher needs to evaluate the performance level of the learners and help the players to have a clear understanding of their own technical level. The individual practice process will lead to the assumption of one's own performance, and there is no good judgment of one's own performance level, for example, whether the piano performance is contagious or not and whether the music played is complete [8,9]. Therefore, piano performance evaluation can not only help players have a clearer understanding of their own playing skills, increase the fun of playing, and improve players' enthusiasm for playing the piano but also assist piano teaching to a certain extent [10].…”

Piano Intelligent Teaching Evaluation with IoT and Multimedia Technology

“…During this period, the performer's ability to correctly understand other people's emotions is cultivated, and with the help of music, the ability to perceive other people's emotions is improved. In a word, learning piano plays a role in promoting all-round development, improving people's comprehensive ability level, and has important signi cance and e ect on ability development and training [1][2][3][4][5].…”

An Introduction to Musical Interactions

“…Bobbe et al [85] propose an application of Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (TaHIL) to piano lessons and present their studies exploring online teaching and learning scenarios. One can argue that the concept of TaHIL [86,87] is not new considering many elements housed in that idea have been around for a long time, especially from the era of telepresence and teleoperation [88,89].…”