Project description
Personalised music learning at your fingertips
Learning to play a musical instrument, such as the piano, demands dedication and practice. Traditionally, students have relied on standardised exercise books or teacher-prescribed drills. However, these methods fall short of addressing individual challenges. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CALIOPE project aims to reshape music education. It will leverage cutting-edge technology to personalise music learning. Teachers collaborate with a sophisticated software system, providing student information and specifying learning goals. In return, the system crafts tailor-made exercises, creating a unique ‘interactive opus’ for each learner. This groundbreaking approach ensures that the learning journey aligns with the student’s abilities, fostering engagement and effective progress.
Objective
Learning to play a musical instrument such as a piano requires many hours of exercises, generally either suggested to the student by a teacher or taken from a “method” book. These books are collections of progressive exercises meant to teach specific techniques and address the commonest mistakes and difficulties that players face while learning. One downside of these books is that the exercises are not personalized to the students, and thus cannot address specific difficulties and characteristics of each learner. Teachers could potentially write or find exercises that are tailored to the different needs of their students, but this activity is very time-consuming, and given the number of students that many teachers have, it becomes prohibitive.
Given the many recent advances in the field of music generation, we propose that it should be possible to generate exercises automatically to form a personalized method for each student. The teacher would describe the characteristics of the student and their strength and weaknesses to a software system, as well as the teaching goals that should be covered in the generated exercises. In return, the system would create a sequence of exercises that are specific to the needs of the student and to the concerns of the teacher. This “interactive opus” would allow for a more effective and engaging learning experience, since the learning difficulty curve would follow each student rather than enforcing a general curriculum.
In CAL:IOPE, I propose to study both a theoretical model for the description of piano learning students, and a computational system to generate progressive exercises based on that model. Advancing knowledge in Computational Creativity and music generation to tackle long-term structure, this project will aim to create an entire set of musical exercises that are coherent in style and difficulty, leading research towards music generation that is useful to human musicians.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium