Touchscreen-based music education tools typically rely on audio and visual feedback, despite the inherently sensorimotor nature of musical learning.Recent advances in surface haptics enable programmable tactile feedback on flat displays, opening new possibilities for multisensory interaction.This paper explores the use of TanvasTouch technology in music education, focusing on design patterns, pedagogical applications, and accessibility.We developed interactive activities using tactile textures to represent musical shapes and conducted an exploratory study with primary school students (ages 6-11).Participants engaged in guided touch tasks to recognize simple musical symbols and instrument shapes, allowing us to assess recognition, engagement, and usability.Results show that surface haptics can support exploratory learning experiences, enhancing traditional audio-visual approaches.However, blind shape recognition was largely unsuccessful, indicating that the technology cannot yet function as a standalone modality for visually impaired users.Instead, TanvasTouch is better suited as a complementary multisensory tool in inclusive educational settings.

This paper explores several ways to drive a music-oriented computer system by push-button controls, with a particular focus on music education for young children and individuals with disabilities.The research investigates a range of interaction paradigms where heterogeneous push-button actions can be mapped onto musical functions, such as triggering Note-On/Note-Off events, dynamically controlling other musical parameters, or playing and stopping pre-recorded sequences.The ultimate goal is to propose a hardware/software ecosystem that utilizes button-based human-computer interfaces that are not specialized for music (e.g., joypads or colored computer keyboards).These paradigms are designed to lower the barrier to entry for engaging with music, making it accessible even to those with limited motor skills or no prior musical training.To this end, we propose an implementation where multiple push-button devices can be connected to a hub that communicates with a computer, and the role of the latter is to associate a customizable musical meaning to button events in the framework of inclusive music education.

This work introduces a mobile app that aims to promote the sight-reading of music with different positions of the clef on the stave.Relying on the principles of game-based learning, the app offers applications primarily in the didactic field: by facilitating and encouraging the learning of this challenging aspect of music, the app on one side contributes to the preservation of intangible musical heritage and, on the other, serves practical educational purposes such as the preparation for Conservatory exams.The results of early experimentation show a general appreciation by test users as it concerns engagement, but also highlight a number of interaction aspects to be improved.

Navigation assistance services for people with visual impairment pose the challenge of providing accurate guidance through non-visual navigation instructions. This paper proposes two techniques to guide the user during navigation assistance, and in particular during turns and straight paths. Both techniques adopt a combination of speech and non-speech audio with the aim of providing continuous, accurate, and unobtrusive guidance. The two solutions differ in the sonification technique used to generate the non-speech audio. The techniques were evaluated in a real-world environment with nine participants having severe visual impairment. Experimental results show that one of the proposed techniques is significantly more effective than a baseline approach adopted in existing solutions, in terms of navigation accuracy during turns and straight paths. Thus, it is a practical and effective solution to the problem of non-visual navigation assistance for people with visual impairment.

People with blindness or severe low vision access mobile devices using screen readers. However, noisy environments can impair screen reader intelligibility. During mobility, this could disorient or even endanger the user. To address this issue, we propose three screen reader speech compensation techniques based on environmental noise: speech rate slowing, adaptive volume increase, and adaptive equalization. Through a study with 12 participants in three simulated noise scenarios, we evaluate screen reader intelligibility and the perceived distraction from the soundscape, with and without compensations. Four of the proposed compensations, in particular those that pair speech rate reduction with volume or equalization adaptation, significantly improve screen reader's speech intelligibility in all the considered scenarios, and the compensations do not have a significant impact on the distraction from the soundscape.

This paper presents the early results of the project titled "A Band in the Cloud", conducted in cooperation between INDIRE, the agency of the Italian Ministry of Education for educational research and innovation, and LIM, the laboratory of sound and music computing of the University of Milan.The goal of the project is to foster the development of musical and extra-musical skills in young learners through a free web-based digital audio workstation.After presenting the state of the art and discussing the pedagogical aims of the initiative, we will describe the technical details of the platform and give details about the release plan.

A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is a hardware and/or software device aiming to ease those operations required for music production, such as arranging, recording, editing, mixing, and, more in general, modifying sounds creatively. A peculiarity of a DAW environment is that most of the work is highly parallelizable, since the basic architecture of a DAW consists in the simultaneous processing of different audio tracks, mainly independent from each other. In order to exploit such a feature, this paper proposes an interface that lets the DAW interact with the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in a standardized way. Despite some academic research and experimentation, the professional audio software industry almost never exploited GPUs when implementing entire DAWs, but only when realising very specific tools or third party extensions (plugins). This work also presents and discusses the outcomes of a number of tests conducted in order to choose the optimal architecture. As a result, a GPU-based approach turned to be a valid alternative to the use of CPUs in the computation of audio effects, such as the rendering of audio tracks after mixing and mastering operations, both in real time and offline.

This paper deals with Harmonic Touch, a Web platform designed to foster the practice of tonal harmony also in young children.The work focuses on one of the experiences provided by the framework, namely the gamification of harmonic change recognition in songs.The platform, specifically equipped with new features to accommodate the needs of teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been tested in two Italian schools in February 2021.Early experimental results about the main difficulties encountered by the children during the games are presented and discussed.

This work presents a dataset of cat vocalizations focusing on the meows emitted in three different contexts: brushing, isolation in an unfamiliar environment, and waiting for food. The dataset contains vocalizations produced by 21 cats belonging to two breeds, namely Maine Coon and European Shorthair. Sounds have been recorded using low-cost devices easily available on the marketplace, and the data acquired are representative of real-world cases both in terms of audio quality and acoustic conditions. The dataset is open-access, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, and it can be retrieved from the Zenodo web repository.

Abstract This paper explores the behavior of an algorithm called Audio Dynamics Automatic Equalization (ADAE). This algorithm has been inspired by research carried out in the context of image restoration: it is the adaptation of a contrast and color unsupervised equalizer for images, called Automatic Color Equalization (ACE), into the audio domain. Beside testing if the domain shift from image to audio processing can bring some interesting result, this work also investigates if ADAE behaves like already-known technologies for audio manipulation and restoration. To this end, after a description of the original and the derived algorithms, quantitative test are carried out using typical analyses from the Sound and Music Computing literature, such as frequency response, transfer function, and harmonic distortion. Finally, the paper discusses how the algorithm introduces dynamic range adjustments and non-linear distortions, thus behaving like a dynamics processor, a harmonic exciter, and a waveshaper.

This paper presents AREmbody, an augmented-reality mobile application for the development of tonal harmony 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.

This paper proposes a methodology to assess the accessibility for blind or visually impaired people of music production software known as Digital Audio Workstations.The products chosen for the tests are Cockos REAPER, Avid Pro Tools, and Steinberg Cubase, three of the most popular solutions falling in this category.Both Microsoft Windows and macOS versions were tested, since these two operating systems natively integrate assistive technologies which provide a further layer to be considered.The degree of accessibility was evaluated in relation to the possibility for blind or visually impaired people to invoke key functions and perform basic operations.Finally, a focus group with visually impaired professional music producers was organized in order to assess the proposed evaluation methodology.

This paper presents Kibo, a MIDI controller equipped with a simplified tangible user interface.Entirely made of wood, Kibo presents eight geometric extractable solids that can be used to trigger note events and to control musical parameters.In the framework of the cooperation with the Music Informatics Lab of the University of Milan, the distinctive features of the device and their applicability to the field of music education have been investigated.Kibo aims to offer intuitive interaction with music parameters and fosters the acquisition of specific skills in a non-formal learning environment.Benefits are particularly evident for specific target categories of users, including preschool and primary school children and people with both physical and cognitive special needs.

Independent mobility is one of the main challenges for blind or visually impaired (BVI) people. In particular, BVI people often need to identify and avoid nearby obstacles, for example a bicycle parked on the sidewalk. This is generally achieved with a combination of residual vision, hearing and haptic sensing using the white cane. However, in many cases, BVI people can only perceive obstacles at short distance (typically about 1m, i.e., the white cane detection range), in other situations obstacles are hard to detect (e.g., those elevated from the ground), while others should not be hit by the white cane (e.g., a standing person). Thus, some time and effort are required to identify the object in order to understand how to avoid it. A solution to these problems can be found in recent computer vision techniques that can run on mobile and wearable devices to detect obstacles at a distance. However, in addition to detecting obstacles, it is also necessary to convey information about them to a BVI user. This contribution presents WatchOut, a sonification technique for conveying real-time information about the main characteristics of an obstacle to a BVI person, who can then use this additional feedback to safely navigate in the environment. WatchOut was designed with a user-centric approach, involving two iterations of online questionnaires with BVI participants in order to define, improve and evaluate the sonification technique. WatchOut was implemented and tested as a module of a mobile app that detects obstacles using state-of-the-art computer vision technology. Results show that the system is considered usable, and can guide the users to avoid more than 85% of the obstacles.

Indoor navigation services for people with visual impairment are being researched in academia, and working systems have already been deployed in public places. While previous research mainly focuses on computing the user's position with high accuracy, providing non-visual navigation instructions is also a challenge and naive approaches can fail in helping users reach their target destination or even expose them to hazards.In this paper we investigate the problem of guiding users to rotate towards a target direction. We propose three different sonification techniques that provide continuous guidance during rotation, and we compare them to a single-impulse baseline, used in previous works. We also explore three variations that reinforce the proposed techniques by combining them with the baseline. A preliminary study with 10 blind participants highlights two dominant techniques, which we analyze through a follow-up study with 18 participants, from 2 groups with very distant cultural backgrounds. While stark differences emerge in the performance from the two groups, we highlight two clear results common to both: 1) one of the proposed techniques significantly outperforms the baseline, reducing the average rotation error by a factor of 3.5 (from 11° to 3°); 2) the interaction speed of this technique, generally slower than the baseline, significantly improves when combined with the baseline technique.

Indoor navigation is an important service, currently investigated both in industry and academia. While the main focus of research is the computation of users' position, the additional challenge of conveying guidance instructions arises when the target user is blind or visually impaired (BVI). This contribution presents our ongoing research aimed at adopting sonification techniques to guide a BVI person. In particular we introduce three sonification techniques to guide the user during rotations. Preliminary results, conducted with 7 BVI people, show that some of the proposed sonification technique outperform a benchmark solution adopted in previous contributions.

This paper presents a teaching methodology mixing elements from the domains of music and informatics as a key enabling to expose primary school pupils to basic aspects of computational thinking. This methodology is organized in two phases exploiting LEGO® bricks respectively as a physical tool and as a metaphor in order to let participants discover a simple notation encoding several basic concepts of the classical musical notation. The related activities, grounded on active learning theory, challenge groups of students to solve musical encoding problems of increasing difficulty.

This work aims at proposing an innovative way to approach music education. The idea is coupling the power of IEEE 1599, an XML-based international standard for music description, to the concept of music meta-instruments, namely new interfaces conceived for a simplified interaction with music contents. The proposed framework will provide a tool for music practice, powered by the multiple and heterogeneous contents contained in an IEEE 1599 document. A case study based on Jean Haury's metapiano will be presented.

After a short review about music education and self-regulation in learning processes, this paper identifies the meta-cognitive strategies that music students should adopt during their instrumental practice. The goal is re-thinking the structure of a didactic e-book for instrumental music education. Thanks to the adoption of the IEEE 1599 standard, the paper outlines a model of active e-book able to improve learners' performances through proper cognitive and multi-modal scaffolds.

According to recent researches, gaming can be used in educational contexts to improve learning processes. In this work, at first serious games are introduced by defining their key features, then their applicability to the music education field will be discussed. Finally, the paper will present a specific case study focusing on real-time solfege of scores with frequent clef changes. The resulting pedagogical game, called iClef, has been designed and implemented to run on mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

Music enjoyment in a digital format is more than listening to a binary file. An overall music description is made of many interdependent aspects, that should be taken into account in an integrated and synchronized way. In this article, a proposal for an advanced interface to enjoy music in all its aspects will be described. The encoding language that allows the design and implementation of such interface is the IEEE P1599 standard, an XML-based format known as MX.

In this article, we describe the MX-Onto ontology for providing a Semantic Web compatible representation of music resources based on their context. The context representation is realized by means of an OWL ontology that describes music information and that defines rules and classes for a flexible genre classification. By flexible classification we mean that the proposed approach enables capturing the subjective interpretation of music genres by defining multiple membership relations between a music resource and the corresponding music genres, thus supporting context-based and proximity-based search of music resources.