Purrfect Pitch: Exploring Musical Interval Learning through Multisensory Interfaces

TL;DR

Purrfect Pitch is a multisensory system combining auditory and haptic feedback to improve musical interval learning, demonstrating enhanced accuracy and consistency in novice learners compared to audio-only training.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel multisensory learning system with wearable haptic feedback for musical ear training, showing improved interval identification performance.

Findings

Participants learned intervals more accurately with multisensory feedback.

Haptic feedback improved learning even after removal of tactile stimuli.

System is comfortable and unobtrusive for users.

Abstract

We introduce Purrfect Pitch, a system consisting of a wearable haptic device and a custom-designed learning interface for musical ear training. We focus on the ability to identify musical intervals (sequences of two musical notes), which is a perceptually ambiguous task that usually requires strenuous rote training. With our system, the user would hear a sequence of two tones while simultaneously receiving two corresponding vibrotactile stimuli on the back. Providing haptic feedback along the back makes the auditory distance between the two tones more salient, and the back-worn design is comfortable and unobtrusive. During training, the user receives multi-sensory feedback from our system and inputs their guessed interval value on our web-based learning interface. They see a green (otherwise red) screen for a correct guess with the correct interval value. Our study with 18 participants shows that our system enables novice learners to identify intervals more accurately and consistently than those who only received audio feedback, even after the haptic feedback is removed. We also share further insights on how to design a multisensory learning system.