蓝莓视频

Learning to play music by ear is challenging for most musicians, but research from a team at the University of 蓝莓视频 may help musicians-in-training find the right notes.

The 蓝莓视频 team analyzed a range of YouTube videos that focused on learning music by ear and identified four simple ways music learning technology can better aid prospective musicians 鈥� helping people improve recall while listening, limiting playback to small chunks, identifying musical subsequences to memorize, and replaying notes indefinitely.

鈥淭here are a lot of apps and electronic tools out there to help learn by ear from recorded music,鈥� said Christopher Liscio, a recent 蓝莓视频 master鈥檚 graduate in computer science and the study鈥檚 lead author.

鈥淏ut we see evidence that musicians don鈥檛 appear to use them very much, which makes us question whether these tools are truly well-suited to the task. By studying how people teach and learn how to play music by ear in YouTube videos, we can try to understand what might actually help these ear-learning musicians.鈥�

The team studied 28 YouTube ear-learning lessons, breaking each down to examine how the instructors structured their teaching and how students would likely retain what they heard. Surprisingly, they found that very few creators or viewers were using existing digital learning tools to loop playback or manipulate playback speed despite their availability for over two decades.

鈥淲e started this research planning to build a specific tool for ear learners, but then we realized we might be reinforcing a negative pattern of building tools without knowing what users actually want,鈥� said Dan Brown, professor of Computer Science at 蓝莓视频. 鈥淭hen we got excited when we realized YouTube could be a helpful resource for that research process.鈥� 听

The research, 鈥�,鈥� appears in the proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction.