ï~~I-MAESTRO: TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED LEARNING FOR MUSIC
Kia Ng,' Tillman Weyde, 2 and Paolo Nesi3
'ICSRiM - University of Leeds, School of Computing & School of Music,
Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
2 City University London, School of Informatics, Department of Computing, Northampton Square,
London N5 2TU, UK
3DISIT-DSI - University of Florence, Via S. Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy
info@ai-maestro.org www.i-maestro.or
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present a project called i-Maestro
(www.i-maestro.org) which develops interactive
multimedia environments for technology enhanced music
education. By exploiting new pedagogical paradigms
with cooperative and interactive self-learning
environments, gesture interfaces, and augmented
instruments, this project builds on recent innovations
resulting from the development of computer and
information technologies and explores novel solutions
for music training in both theory and performance. This
paper discusses general context of the project along with
the developments, together with an overview of the
framework and highlights a number of different tools to
support technology-enhanced music learning and
teaching.
1. INTRODUCTION
The i-Maestro project explores innovative solutions for
technology-enhanced music education with a particular
focus on bowed string instruments.
Music performance is not simply to play the right note
at the right time. Among the many challenging aspects of
music education, we are particularly interested in linking
music practice and theory training, looking at
interactivity, expressivity and accessibility.
Guided by an analysis of pedagogical needs, the
project develops enabling technologies to support music
performance and theory training, including tools based on
augmented instruments, gesture analysis, audio analysis
and processing, score following, symbolic music
representation, cooperative support and exercise
generation for tuition, self-learning, and collaborative
work scenarios.
i-Maestro offers a flexible, interactive multimedia
framework and supporting tools which builds on recent
innovations resulting from the development of computer
and information technologies.
2. FRAMEWORK AND TOOLS
With the continuous user requirements analysis, a set of
use cases, test cases and pedagogical scenarios have been
translated into specifications of the framework and tools.
An overview of the framework is given in the diagram as
presented in Figure 1.
In this section, we highlight several i-Maestro tools that
support different aspects of music learning and teaching.
Figure 1. An overview of the i-Maestro framework.
Sensors Posture and Visual Audio Accessible
interface Gesture Rendering and Rendering and Interface
interaction acquisition
I-MAESTRO Music Training Exercise Processor
Symbolic Practice Training Music Editing Assessment
Training Processing Tools + Score- Models and Tools
processing Tools Following
I-MAESTRO Other players Cooperative Support Audio
[DB access and tools for Music Training Processor:
beat, pitch, etc.
I-MAESTRO Client Tool
i-Maestro I-MAESTRO
School Production Tools To other
MI-MAEST S
ServerClient Cools t1
Teacher,
Assessment
Wxpertsok po
Group of students
I-MAESTRO
P2P and
Cooperative
Work Support
Educational individual
Cot, students
profiles, history
Group of students
2.1. Symbolic Music Representation
Music notation is fundamentals in music education.
i-Maestro is promoting MPEG Symbolic Music
Representation (SMR), an ISO standard for the
representation of music notation with enhanced
multimedia features [3, 4, 8, 9, 15].
Figure 2 shows an MPEG SMR player/decoder, which
has been implemented within the IM1 MPEG-4 reference
software.
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