Developing Music Harmony Awareness in Young Students
through an Augmented Reality Approach
Federico Avanzini
1 a
, Adriano Barat
`
e
1 b
, Mauro Cottini
1
, Luca Andrea Ludovico
1 c
and Marcella Mandanici
2 d
1
Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale, Dipartimento di Informatica “Giovanni Degli Antoni”,
Universit
`
a degli Studi di Milano, Via G. Celoria 18, Milano, Italy
2
Dipartimento di Didattica della Musica, Conservatorio di Musica “Luca Marenzio”,
Piazza A. Benedetti Michelangeli 1, Brescia, Italy
Keywords:
Tonal Harmony, Augmented Reality, Physical Interaction, Mobile Devices.
Abstract:
This paper presents AREmbody, an augmented-reality mobile application for the development of tonal har-
mony awareness. Continuing from previous prototypes based on full body and desktop interaction, AREmbody
benefits from a very simple portable setup which allows physical interaction and supports the activity of one
or more users. The application combines in a single mobile device a video processor, a media player and a
movement tracker, opening the way to the design of harmonic games with challenges and recordable scores.
Thus the application not only fosters music education activities in the classroom, but also extends them outside
the school times and places, promoting educational practices in informal and private contexts.
1 INTRODUCTION
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are
attracting growing interest in the world of application
designers, technological entrepreneurship and culture
innovators (Becker et al., 2017).
The possibility offered by AR to create respon-
sive environments where information may be super-
imposed to real objects is extremely appealing in
many fields such as engineering analysis (Li et al.,
2017), maintenance (Azuma, 1997), medical diag-
nosis (Douglas et al., 2017) and many others. On
the other hand, VR offers further opportunities be-
cause it allows the creation of artificial responsive en-
vironments in which users are completely immersed
and where they can manipulate virtual objects and
obtain feedback in real time (Brooks, 1999). This
has given life to dozens of applications in the fields
of vehicle simulation (Kljuno and Williams, 2008),
training (Gonz
´
alez et al., 2017) and healthcare (Mo-
line, 1997). Even if affected by several limitations
and poor dissemination due to technical difficulties
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1257-5878
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8435-8373
c
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8251-2231
d
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1863-4178
or high costs, AR and VR applications are gaining
ground in the fields of architecture, engineering and
construction (Chi et al., 2013) as well as trough game-
based approaches (Dinis et al., 2017).
Fred Brooks, one of the fathers of computer sci-
ence, considered virtual reality as a medium primarily
devoted to augment human intelligence and therefore
particularly suitable for learning (Brooks Jr, 1996).
This is the reason why virtual and augmented real-
ity attracts the attention of educators and pedagogues,
who try to develop efficient instructional approaches
in order to take full advantage of the great potential
offered by these technologies. Indeed, when shift-
ing from practical and entertainment uses to educa-
tion, a considerable amount of human factors issues
emerge such as teachers’ practices and training, dif-
ferent learning styles of the students, and the tech-
nological and didactic effectiveness of the applica-
tions (Keenaghan and Horv
´
ath, 2014).
Probably, the alignment of instructional design,
systems’ affordances, and didactic goals is the best
way to exploit the learning potentials of AR and VR
environments. Particularly, some interesting features
emerge from AR and VR review analysis. One is
the possibility offered by AR and VR of visualizing
and interacting with abstract objects, such as the dis-
position of the planets (Lindgren et al., 2016) or the
56
Avanzini, F., Baratè, A., Cottini, M., Ludovico, L. and Mandanici, M.
Developing Music Harmony Awareness in Young Students through an Augmented Reality Approach.
DOI: 10.5220/0010144700560063
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA 2020), pages 56-63
ISBN: 978-989-758-480-0
Copyright
c
2020 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
combinations of chemical elements (Cai et al., 2014),
which are not visible in real life. The opportunity
of disclosing hidden concepts and processes makes
them available for students’ understanding and deeper
knowledge (Wu et al., 2013). A second characteristic
is spatial learning and function recognition, which im-
plicitly derive from the process of visualization and
are deeply involved when dealing with geometrical
shapes (Kirner et al., 2012) or mechanical machin-
ery (Poh et al., 2005). A third element is physical
or full-body interaction, which is considered a strong
means to create involvement and to foster learning
processes (Price and Rogers, 2004).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in
Section 2 we will present related work dealing with
two aspects, namely the use of AR in music education
and computer-based approaches to learn tonal har-
mony, which is the focus of our proposal; in Section 3
we will report the results achieved by previous exper-
imentation that we conducted in the field; in Section
4 we will provide details about the AR-based app for
iOS that we designed and developed with the aim to
foster music harmony awareness in young students;
finally, in Section 5 we will draw conclusions.
2 RELATED WORK
While the use of VR in music education has been
investigated in various projects, we will focus on
AR, that nowadays is a relevant field of interest and
is more related to our work. The aim of many
AR applications is supporting people in learning
how to play musical instruments. Performing in-
structions for piano players such as the keys to
be pressed, fingering suggestions or the display of
chords to be added to melodies are projected on
the keyboard through the use of a computer moni-
tor (Barakonyi and Schmalstieg, 2005; Goodwin and
Green, 2013), head-mounted displays (Chow et al.,
2013; Fernandez et al., 2016; Hackl and Anthes,
2017), or ceiling-mounted projector (Rogers et al.,
2014). There are also noticeable examples of appli-
cations for the study of other instruments, such as the
acoustic guitar (L
¨
ochtefeld et al., 2011) or the Chi-
nese guqin
1
(Zhang et al., 2015).
Likewise, music perception and music notation
skills may benefit of AR applications. In (Lemos
et al., 2017), a melody composed of painted notes is
filled by the children on paper and then recognized
in real time by a mobile’s camera; once the image
is acquired and processed, the notes may be played
1
The Chinese guqin belongs to the family of plucked
string instruments called citharas or table psalteries.
and checked by the system. A similar application,
called Augmented Songbook, is based on pre-printed
music sheets (Rusi
˜
nol et al., 2018). These gameful
approaches are very engaging for children and, con-
sequently, represent useful tools for music education.
The simplicity and ubiquity of mobile devices make
them suitable for use in the classroom as well as in
other private contexts, thus fostering the diffusion of
educational practices.
On the side of computer applications for the study
of tonal harmony, a very traditional approach that
does not involve VR or AR approaches may be
found in the MacGAMUT Music Software, where ex-
ercises of tonal harmony dictation are organized in
unities of growing difficulty
2
. The technical infor-
mation is provided by the popular book of Koska
and Payne about tonal harmony (Kostka and Payne,
2013) for which MacGAMUT acts as a computer-
based complementary worksheet.
A less academic and more playful approach can be
found in the Theta Music Trainer platform, where the
user can also find music games for tonic chord recog-
nition
3
and for the identification of common chord
patterns
4
. The commercial software Mapping Tonal
Harmony
5
offers an interactive tool for visualizing a
map of the tonal functions created from music anal-
ysis, while the Chordify platform
6
performs a song
harmonization outlining chord names, chord changes,
and instrumental positions and fingering for their per-
formance. However, it must be highlighted that these
useful tools are based on a high degree of the user’s
abilities, such as reading music notation, playing a
harmonic instrument, or understanding chord notation
and music structure.
3 BACKGROUND RESEARCH
The current proposal is rooted in previous research
concerning the exploration of tonal music harmony
and the development of harmonic awareness for chil-
dren, students or non professional musicians.
The difficulty of explaining the complex theory
behind tonal harmony and the need to avoid music
notation led us to the use of spatial representations
of the music structure. These offer the possibility of
2
https://www.macgamut.com/
3
https://trainer.thetamusic.com/en/content/
html5-tonic-finder
4
https://trainer.thetamusic.com/en/content/
html5-speaker-chords
5
https://mdecks.com/
6
https://chordify.net/
Developing Music Harmony Awareness in Young Students through an Augmented Reality Approach
57
exploring the sound of the various chords and cou-
pling them with precise locations in space. Thus,
the timed harmonic changes occurring during a music
piece produce precise movement patterns which can
be easily learned and reproduced by the users. Once
learned through embodied activities, movements can
be employed in a computer environment for perfor-
mance (Mandanici et al., 2019).
Technology has played a fundamental role in sup-
porting these goals, by providing automatic tools for
the detection of movements in the space (e.g., user’s
actions captured by a webcam), the performance of
suitable music objects (e.g., chords triggered by spe-
cific events), and the collection of results (e.g., tem-
porized sequences of chords saved in a database).
Concerning background research, it is worth men-
tioning two fundamental stages, which implied the
design and release of computer-based solutions al-
ready tested in educational environments: Harmonic
Walk and Harmonic Touch. These applications will
be now described in detail.
3.1 Harmonic Walk
A first attempt to apply embodiment to music har-
mony awareness led to the design of a HW/SW sys-
tem called Harmonic Walk, whose goal was to asso-
ciate chord sequences to the movements of a user in a
large-scale bi-dimensional environment thanks to spa-
tial exploration and learning (Mandanici et al., 2016).
The user’s interface consisted of a rectangular car-
pet positioned on the floor and reproducing a simpli-
fied version of a major tonality harmonic space. The
visual reference for the location of the various chords
was provided via specific cue points. The interaction
happened when the user stepped on one of the inter-
active landmarks linked to the chord sounds.
The architecture of the system was roughly com-
posed of two software modules, aimed at video anal-
ysis and sound synthesis respectively. A video cam-
era mounted on the ceiling and oriented perpendicu-
lar to the floor captured the user’s movements inside
a rectangular area, whose dimensions depended from
both from the camera-to-floor distance and the lens’
field of view. As the system was designed for class-
room activities, the goal was to monitor a limited area,
about 3m×4m. The video module analyzed the im-
ages provided by the camera in order to detect the
user’s position. Coordinates were sent via OSC
7
to
7
Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for network-
ing sound and multimedia devices for purposes such as mu-
sical performance or show control. It was originally in-
tended for sharing music performance data, such as ges-
tures, parameters and note sequences, between digital mu-
Figure 1: Session of Harmonic Walk.
Figure 2: The interface of Harmonic Touch, exercise #1.
the sound synthesis module, implemented in the Max
environment
8
.
Depending on the user’s position, the sound mod-
ule produced the sound of given chords. In this way, a
free exploration of space let the player acquire aware-
ness of music chords and learn the paths connected to
the most common harmonic progressions.
3.2 Harmonic Touch
Harmonic Touch is a Web platform for the investiga-
tion and practice of tonal harmony. It has been con-
ceived as a step-by-step path that leads users towards
the discovery of important features of tonal harmony
by leveraging on chord perception, gestural interac-
tion and gamification techniques. Three groups of ex-
periences are proposed to the user, focusing on: 1)
the recognition of the implicit harmony, 2) the timed
recognition of harmonic changes, and 3) melody har-
monization. Each scenario has been discussed in de-
tail in (Avanzini et al., 2019a).
Harmonic Touch recalls and extends the con-
cepts of tonal-harmony space exploration introduced
sical instruments.
8
https://cycling74.com/
CHIRA 2020 - 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications
58
by Harmonic Walk by reviving them in a Web en-
vironment. Now, physical movements over a bi-
dimensional surface can be performed on a PC screen,
with no need to employ the HW/SW setup described
in Section 3.1. The environment embeds both the
on-screen movement tracker and the sound synthesis
modules; moreover, the harmonic awareness achieved
by students can be automatically assessed through
a computer-based analysis of the data collected by
the Web platform, as discussed in (Avanzini et al.,
2019b).
In this context, we are mainly interested in the ex-
ercises dealing with the timed recognition of chord
changes, which should constitute the final goal of
the step-by-step process. Moreover, the AR appli-
cation proposed in the following focuses on this sce-
nario. Melody harmonization requires to select the
right chords at the exact timing in order to accompany
a music tune. The original piece, with the expected
chord sequence, can be listened before the user starts
playing. The activity consists in the recognition of the
best-fitting chord among the proposed ones, whose
selection should occur at a time as close as possible to
the actual harmonic change. For this exercise, chords
are represented along a circle, like in Harmonic Walk.
At present, the Web interface is undergoing a re-
implementation mainly aiming to: 1) add a back-
office section to manage music pieces, 2) obtain a bet-
ter tracking of user’s results, and 3) review the graph-
ical user interface, so as to introduce responsive de-
sign and improve young users’ engagement. The first
and the second group of exercises are already avail-
able at http://harmonictouch.lim.di.unimi.it/, ready to
be tested in primary schools after COVID-19 closure.
The new interface is shown in Figure 2.
4 AREmbody: AN AR-ENHANCED
APPROACH
The aim of the whole research project is to foster the
development of music harmony awareness through
embodiment. Recently, the idea of implementing a
third application has emerged, on one side to sim-
plify the setup required by Harmonic Walk, thus mak-
ing the solution available for personal use, and, on
the other, to improve the user’s experience of Har-
monic Touch by reintroducing movements in a physi-
cal space. To this goal, we have designed and imple-
mented an AR-based application, currently available
for iOS devices, called AREmbody. In this section, we
will discuss technical aspects (Section 4.1), the game
play (Section 4.2), and the advantages with respect to
already developed solutions (Section 4.3).
4.1 Technical Remarks
AREmbody is a free app for iOS devices, mainly in-
tended for iPhone and iPad. Due to the limitations im-
posed by Apple on the use of AR, it can be installed
on models starting from iPhone 6s and running iOS
13 or a more recent version of the operating system.
Currently, AREmbody is not available on the Apple
App Store, but we are planning to release it in a pub-
lic repository.
The app has been implemented in Swift, a pro-
gramming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS
and other Apple platforms,
9
. The user interface has
been realized in SwiftUI
10
.
The most technologically advanced part of the ap-
plication adopts AR to let the user interact with the
scene. In order to achieve this result, two frameworks
by Apple, namely ARKit and SceneKit, have been
used.
ARKit
11
aims to create a correspondence between
virtual spaces and real spaces, thanks to the technique
of visual-inertial odometry. This process combines
the information coming from the sensors of the de-
vice (such as the accelerometer and gyroscope) with
the analysis of the scene shot by the camera. In
detail, the framework is able to recognize the most
important characteristics of the scene, keep track of
the differences in the positions of these cue points
across frames provided by the camera, and compare
this information with that coming from motion sen-
sors. This combination allows the device to accu-
rately model its position in space and its orientation.
ARKit therefore connects the real word with the vir-
tual one, i.e. the virtual space set by the developer to
contain AR objects.
SceneKit
12
is a 3D graphics framework that lets
the programmer create 3D scenes within an applica-
tion. It combines a high-performance rendering en-
gine with descriptive APIs that allow the import, ma-
nipulation and rendering of 3D assets. In order to
structure the content of the scene, SceneKit imple-
ments a so-called scene graph, consisting of:
the root node of the graph, which defines a coor-
dinate space for the whole scene;
other nodes that populate the scene, with visible
content such as 3D assets.
The spatial and logical structure of a SceneKit
scene is determined by the hierarchy of nodes that it
contains.
9
https://developer.apple.com/swift/
10
https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/
11
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/
12
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/scenekit/
Developing Music Harmony Awareness in Young Students through an Augmented Reality Approach
59
T
Tp
D
Dp
SD
SDp
Figure 3: The six markers.
AREmbody integrates ARKit and SceneKit tech-
nologies in order to analyze the scene, recognize the
presence of custom graphical signs called markers,
and add the corresponding AR objects.
Since the goal is to foster harmony awareness,
both markers and AR objects are related to tonal func-
tions, and, more specifically, chord symbols. Follow-
ing Riemann’s harmonic theory (Riemann, 1896), the
tonal space can be divided into:
Primary chords, called tonic (T), subdominant
(SD), and dominant (D), built on the I, IV, and
V grade of the major scale respectively;
Parallel chords, called parallel tonic (Tp), parallel
subdominant (SDp), and parallel dominant (Dp),
built on the VI, II, and III grade of the major scale
respectively.
For further details about the music theoretical back-
ground, please refer to (Mandanici et al., 2019).
In order to improve their recognition by ARKit, the
images representing chords should be as different as
possible, like photos portraying completely inhomo-
geneous subjects; but, in this case, the goal was also
to keep a graphical coherence among markers. As
the result of a compromise, images are characterized
by distinguishing chord letters and randomly disposed
background symbols, as shown in Figure 3.
4.2 User’s Interface and Game Play
AREmbody is an app that presents a number of views,
including game instructions, contact, and a setup win-
Figure 4: Recognition of markers and superimposition of
chord symbols in AR.
dow. The most relevant view, representing the user’s
interface during the game play, is shown in Figure 4.
One of the noticeable aspects of AREmbody is the
possibility to manage on a single device a number of
different users, also organized by school and class. In
this way, a game session addressing a group of par-
ticipants reduces the dead time for setting up the app
and switch players. Moreover, a single app instance
can trace, analyze and compare different users’ re-
sults across a game session, an activity spanning over
different sessions, and even an experimentation con-
ducted in different classes and schools. In the lower
part of Figure 4, it is possible to notice the name of the
current player (in this case, “Mauro”) and the controls
to switch to the previous/next player.
The other key aspect is the choice of the piece to
harmonize, which happens before the game session
starts. During the game play, the controls in the lower
part of the interface allow to start and stop the play-
back. Moreover, a switch lets the player enter a sand-
box, so as to listen to the reference piece: in this sce-
nario, the original song is played with its correct har-
monization, and user’s actions are not tracked.
During the playback, the song is reduced to its
CHIRA 2020 - 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications
60
leading voice, whereas accompanying chords are de-
manded to user’s actions. Specifically, the gesture
that triggers the production of a given chord is the oc-
clusion of the corresponding marker. As far as the
marker is covered in the scene framed by the camera,
the chord is considered active, and it is turned off as
soon as the marker becomes visible again.
Different means can be used to enable/disable
chord recognition, also depending on markers’ size
and layout: the whole body, a body part (e.g., hands
or feet), a covering object (such as a paper sheet, a
book, or a paddle), an interaction with markers (such
as flipping the sheet). The system promptly reacts to
these events and records the timing with reference to
the song’s position.
The AR component superimposes chord symbols
over the corresponding markers, mainly with two
goals: 1) making them more easily retrievable dur-
ing the game play, and 2) confirming that the track-
ing system of the device is correctly managing their
recognition. Concerning the latter aspect, AR sym-
bols appear when markers are present in the scene,
and disappear when they are no more recognized, due
to framing (the marker is actually away) or to tempo-
rary occlusion (the player is hiding it). Further pos-
sible uses, not implemented in the current version of
AREmbody, will be proposed in the next section.
At the end of each session, results are stored in the
device. The app presents a function to export them in
JSON,
13
so as to feed a database or an external analy-
sis module. The non-trivial research problem of how
to assess this kind of raw data has been investigated
in (Avanzini et al., 2020).
4.3 Main Advantages
AREmbody is basically a portable and personal ver-
sion of Harmonic Walk, focusing on the third group
of exercises of Harmonic Touch and equipped with
advanced features.
The first goal was to simplify the setup require-
ments of Harmonic Walk, but preserving the body
interaction within a physical space. Nowadays, a
solution is offered by mobile devices, which typi-
cally embed video cameras and currently have com-
putational power sufficient to process images, track
markers and produce sound. With respect to the
HW/SW equipment required by Harmonic Walk, a
mobile phone can be seen as an all-in-one device, act-
ing as a video processor, a media player, a movement
tracker, a multiple-user performance recorder, and a
13
JSON, standing for JavaScript Object Notation, is a
lightweight data-interchange format based on structured
plain text.
local database with export functions. The app can
run on a tripod-held as well as a hand-held device,
as shown in Figures 5 and 6.
Figure 5: The app running on a tripod-held device.
Figure 6: The app running on a hand-held device.
Developing Music Harmony Awareness in Young Students through an Augmented Reality Approach
61
AREmbody supports not only a personal, but also
a personalized user’s experience. Many aspects of
the educational activity previously constrained by
the setup can now be customized, ranging from the
appearance of printable markers (graphical content,
size, material, etc.) to their layout in the physical
space (number of markers, position, expected body
interaction, etc.). These features introduce flexibil-
ity in the educational experience, which can take into
account visual, physical and cognitive impairments.
Concerning the first aspect, it is possible to emphasize
graphical differences between chord signs by stress-
ing color contrast, increasing markers’ sizes, using
bigger or more readable fonts, etc. Moreover, vi-
sual markers can be associated with tangible cues for
BVI
14
people. With respect to physical impairments,
users are not required to walk on a carpet (which is
still a possibility), but, for instance, they can also oc-
clude markers on a table by hand or move the camera
away: these gestures would equally preserve the rela-
tionship between space and harmony. Finally, when
considering cognitive impairments, the exercise can
be suitably simplified, for example by reducing the
number of choices or adopting other spatial layouts
(e.g., a linear instead of a circular one). Even if the
AREmbody game play can be user-tailored, the men-
tioned choices should be supervised by an expert, so
that the pedagogical efficacy is preserved.
With respect to its potential, the AR component
of the game play is probably underused. In the cur-
rent version of ARembody, the main purpose of AR
is to enrich the user’s experience, basically to high-
light the recognition of markers, to reinforce their po-
sition, and to make the game play more appealing. In
a future version, AR could better support a number of
user-defined features. First, colors, font types, text di-
mensions, etc. could fall under the user’s control, so
as to improve the user’s experience, also with the side
effect of helping impaired players. Besides, graphi-
cal aspects could adapt to specific environmental sce-
narios, such as poor lighting conditions or crowded
scenes. Finally, the AR content itself could become
more informative, providing alternative text or guid-
ance in form of animations. For example, a visual hint
could indicate the proximity of a chord change and/or
suggest the right choice.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have presented AREmbody, an iOS
app aiming to foster tonal harmony awareness in
14
BVI stands for Blind or Visually Impaired.
young students through embodiment. The capability
to analyze the scene captured by the camera and to
add AR objects to its visualization in the display pro-
vides a gamified approach to interact with the real en-
vironment, which is expected to produce better learn-
ing results. The app also provides a number of fea-
tures to improve performance assessment, ranging
from the support to articulated game play sessions
(multi-player, multi-class, etc.) to the possibility to
collect, export, and finally analyze results.
Concerning future work, we are mainly exploring
three directions. First, we want to address a wider
audience of users: since the iOS app requires rela-
tively recent and expensive devices, we are studying
the feasibility of an Android version, that should run
also on low-budget smartphones. A second goal is
to extend the functionalities in order to cover all the
exercise types available in Harmonic Touch, that re-
sponded to a well-defined pedagogical path: recog-
nition of the implicit harmony, timed recognition of
harmonic changes, and melody harmonization; con-
versely, the current release of AREmbody focuses on
the final step only. Finally, in September 2020 we
expect that school activities can restart after the lock-
down due to COVID-19 emergency. This would allow
to test the educational achievements of AREmbody in
a real-world scenario.
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