The Open University, UK
Comments: Murat and This paper presents a "haptic drum kit," which adds vibrotactile actuators to the wrists and ankles to teach rhythms to people, specifically novice or unexperienced drummers.
The paper gives a background on the "human innate capacity for rhythm." Basically, all people involuntarily respond to natural rhythms and "periodic phenomena in the environment." Our brains might even have dedicated neurons for rhythmic processing. Specific instruction in rhythmic techniques may help people overcome specific physical challenges or limitations.
The experience of creating rhythm depends on the prior exposure, or "feeling," of various rhythms. Dalcroze, a famous music instructor, noted that students were better able to work with technical and written elements of music if they had the previous experience of "feeling" musical and rhythmic examples. He invented a system of feeling rhythm in his teachings by having students perform activities, such as walking, in specific rhythmic ways.
There is a theory known as sensory motor contingency theory that suggests that in order to learn some physical skill in some domain, the learning must be able to manipulate the domain physically. This has applications in musical rhythm because people can use arms, legs, and other things to create and modify rhythm. This theory provides support for the haptic drum kit that these researchers have devised.
Finally, the paper talks about the concept of entrainment, which is the tendency for two two connected processes to "connect" in some common rhythm. This is important to this research because the "students" or users will be playing a drum beat along with an audio and haptic beat. The convergence of the user to the presented rhythm is necessary to learn the rhythms. All these theoretical views on rhythmic learning helped to inspire the Haptic Drum Kit.
The Haptic Drum Kit consists of four vibrotactile actuators attached to the wrists and ankles with wristbands. The actuators are connected to a circuit board which is connected to a computer running the drum kit software and controlling audio playback.
A user study was conducted with 5 people. The goal of the study was to determine if rhythms can be taught using a combination of audio and haptic feedback. 20 rhythms were chosen from different classes of rhythms to represent a complete range of rhythms that typical drummers might learn.
When each rhythm was presented to a user, it was done with audio only, with haptics only, and with audio + haptic feedback. The user was to play along with each rhythm. It is unclear how exactly the rhythm is sent to each limb, though it seems that whatever limb is to play the current note is vibrated, while the audio lets the user know which drum to actually hit.
Probably because of this, all users preferred the mixture of audio and haptic feedback for playing back the drum patterns.
A few issues were revealed with the vibrotactile actuators. They involved things like being too "quiet" or "soft" or being slightly delayed, thus "blurring" the rhythm on fast rhythms.
Using results of the study, the paper discusses the state of the hardware and possible upgrades and future work.
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Being someone who is interested in rhythms and drumming but lacks the training or experience, I am interested in the approach to rhythmic training using vibrotactile feedback. We have already seen a suit that employs haptic feedback to teach specific movements. This uses a similar concept to teach a different kind of "movement," that which creates rhythm.
This system also explores multi-modal learning, presenting audio tracks coupled with vibration. The researchers seemed to be pretty successful at teaching the drum patterns despite some hardware limitations.
I think this work is more promising than TIKL, perhaps due to its better mappings of vibration to action and fewer vibrotactile actuators.
3 comments of glory:
I agree that this is a more practical implementation than the TIKL example. Some of the subjective comments were of interest, in particular feeling in sync with the haptic stimulation when correctly playing confirmed an intuitive component to the system. Also, the use of only four stimulators would not overwhelm the subject.
I think that this would be a very good teaching tool. However, I wonder how long is the learning curve with this device. It seems like it would take me quite a while before I start mapping the pulses to the proper movement.
I wonder if the device would help those who are really bad with music and rhythm.
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