Virtual music teacher for new music learners with optical music recognition

Abstract

Learn to read and understand a music sheet, then play it on a musical instrument are difficult tasks to most beginner music learners. This motivates the authors to propose Virtual Music Teacher, a system to assist beginner music learners in their learning process. By applying our proposed lightweight Optical Music Recognition algorithm to scan and recognize a music sheet, then combine with sound classifying technique, the proposed system can learn what note to be played next, then help a music learner to play it correctly. The experimental results on the dataset consisting of 15 musical scores for beginners show that the proposed system can classify with precision up to 99.9 % using multiple SVM classifiers approach, whereas the sound classifying technique using Fast Fourier Transform can classify note’s pitch recorded from a piano with precision up to 95.71 %. The system is implemented as an application on mobile devices and can be used to assist a music learner to play not only piano but other musical instruments as well.