Ism: Improvisation supporting systems with melody correction and key vibration

Abstract

This paper describes improvisation support for musicians who do not have sufficient improvisational playing experience. The goal of our study is to enable such players to learn the skills necessary for improvisation and to enjoy it. In achieving this goal, we have two objectives: enhancing their skill for instantaneous melody creation and supporting their practice for acquiring this skill. For the first objective, we developed a system that automatically corrects musically inappropriate notes in the melodies of users' improvisations. For the second objective, we developed a system that points out musically inappropriate notes by vibrating corresponding keys. The main issue in developing these systems is how to detect musically inappropriate notes. We propose a method for detecting them based on the N-gram model. Experimental results show that this N-gram-based method improves the accuracy of detecting musically inappropriate notes and our systems are effective in supporting unskilled musicians' improvisation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.