MoveMe

摘要

Fine motor skills like finger/hand manipulations are essential for playing musical instruments and these skills require a great amount of time and effort to acquire. Researchers have been introducing haptic feedback systems in order to facilitate the process of learning motor skills but little research has expanded the possibility of applying to the field of musical instruments. Hence, we developed a system called "MoveMe" that provides three-dimensional haptic support for playing a musical instrument. The system guides a user's hands as if someone else was holding their hands to help a beginner play a musical instrument. With the system, an expert can pre-record his/her movements so that a beginner can play it back later as necessary. Alternatively, the system connects an expert and a beginner via two haptic robots and the expert can, in real time, guide and correct the beginner's movement. In addition to those functionalities, we introduce a new proficiency metric provided by force feedback. A master can evaluate how much a beginner has improved using both audio feedback as well as this new force-based metric. Through the experiments that we conducted, we found that our system is effective in terms of playing a song at a correct speed and rhythm.