MatchMySound: Introducing feedback to online music education

Abstract

The quick spread of the internet has made music education, once only the domain of the rich elite, accessible to an unprecedented number of people around the world. As private tuition is still expensive, however, most people currently learning an instrument do so based purely on one-way instructional materials that provide information without any feedback. In this paper, we describe and implement a system which can be used to add interactive exercises to web-based self study materials that will provide immediate feedback on student’s playing by comparing it to the example played by the teacher. To evaluate the quality of the feedback produced by the system, its scoring is compared to two conservatory level teachers on 216 guitar exercise attempts made by 108 beginner hobbyist guitarists. Results indicate that the system shows strong promise as its grades correspond quite well with the grades given by human teachers.