A study on the effect of visualization in computer-assisted music education for education of musical dynamics

Abstract

Many musicians and students have difficulty playing with musical dynamics. The expression of musical dynamics is subjective and cannot be heard well by students themselves. For this problem, we present a method of teaching using musical dynamics with visualized amplitude changes, using computer-assisted music education. We tried to test the effectiveness of the interface and the educational role of this means of teaching using visualization. The purpose of our experiments was to study whether this interface was pertinent to educational effectiveness. The aim of the evaluations was to prove that this interface is effective and helpful for the teaching of musical dynamics. In these experiments, a song was played and compared using the images. The image of a teacher’s dynamics, which converted sound to visualization through this interface, was compared with students’ images. And, based on these images, we evaluated the technical and artistic aspects to objective and subjective outcomes. We also conducted a survey of students’ satisfaction by user-subjective experience in this interface. The results indicated that the interface helped students to play with better expression. The final results indicated that the new suggested method of education was better than using the traditional method of education. This shows that the role of visualization in computer-assisted music education for the creation of musical dynamics has a positive effect on music education.