MIR in Music Education

There has been a steadily growing interest in the application of Information Technology (IT) to Education in the past 2-3 decades. The advancements in machine learning, data mining and statistics have driven progress in Educational Data Mining. Another instance of this tendency is the recent NIPS 2012 workshop on personalizing education with machine learning.

With the increasing robustness and reliability of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms and the drive towards sustainable software for audio and music research, a socially relevant application that can bring different MIR techniques together under a common goal is music education. Indeed, there has been interest in the past in music education software with several successful initiatives over the years. However, not all of these have relied on recently developed MIR techniques as highlighted in a comprehensive report from a recent Dagstuhl seminar.

Music Education
Main Article: Music Education

Music education is a field of study associated with the teaching and learning of music. It touches on all domains of learning, including the psychomotor domain (the development of skills), the cognitive domain (the acquisition of knowledge), and, in particular and significant ways, the affective domain, including music appreciation and sensitivity. There are a diverse range of music education methods that are employed to teach music, each of which introduces its own distinctive approach to develop various musical skills. Among these, the notable ones are the Dalcroze method, Kod&aacute;ly method, Orff approach and Suzuki method. There exist other lesser-known methods that are either derived from these or adopt entirely different approaches.

Standards and assessment
Standards of assessment in music education are used to guide educators in determining objectives for their teaching. Use of standards became a common practice in many nations during the 20th century. MENC: The National Association for Music Education, created nine voluntary content standards, called the National Standards for Music Education. These standards call for:

 Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines. Reading and notating music. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music. Evaluating music and music performances. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts.</li> Understanding music in relation to history and culture.</li> </ol> Many states and school districts have adopted their own standards for music education.

Music Information Retrieval
Main Article: Music Information Retrieval

Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in musicology, psychology, academic music study, signal processing, machine learning or some combination of these.

Predominant applications of MIR research have been music recommendation, track separation and instrument recognition, automatic music transcription, automatic music categorization and music generation.

Goals of Technology for Music Education
Considering the diversity of skills that music education aims to develop in students, the different goals of music education software are just as diverse. Many of these goals also apply to learning in general. These can be roughly categorized into the following:

Facilitate better student-teacher communication: Often, in a classroom setting with a high student-to-teacher ratio, it becomes difficult for a teacher to pay detailed attention to each student's progress thus making it difficult for her/him to provide appropriate feedback. This results in a communication gap which negatively affects a student's progress. Intelligent Tutoring Systems can fill this gap by (1) providing routine feedback to students on their performance thus getting the teacher involved only when crucial feedback is needed, and (2) summarizing the progress of individual students in an easily interpretable format to the teacher to facilitate better progress monitoring. Make learning a more engaging experience: The process of acquiring a new musical skill, particularly at an early stage of learning when the required effort is high and the visible results are low can be hard to get through for many students. Moreover, repetition of the same task, while certainly necessary in perfecting a skill, tends to make learning boring and tedious. A solution to this is to incorporate aspects of gaming into music learning through musical games. This essentially involves camouflaging an uninteresting aspect of learning in an interesting visage which also gives the student a sense of progression and keeps her/his motivation high. Focus learning on relevant material: At intermediate or advanced stages of learning, a student might find her/himself wanting to practice more of certain specific techniques or styles of music. This requires lesson plans which are focus on specific goals. In such a situation, systems that can analyse music data and recommend appropriate music, lessons and practice exercises would make it more efficient to realize these goals. This can help strike a balance between establishing a common ground between students, while at the same time accommodating for their individual development as they desire. Making learning more pervasive: One can take advantage of the pervasiveness of mobile technologies to make certain aspects of music education available whenever desired. This would essentially turn idle time into learning time through mobile apps and games. Apps that help improve one's music theory basics, one's sense of rhythm, finger coordination are some examples.

List of companies making music education software

 * SmartMusic
 * Ovelin
 * Ubisoft

List of MIR research groups interested in music education

 * Fraunhofer IDMT

List of music education software

 * WildChords (Ovelin)
 * GNU Solfege
 * Rocksmith (Ubisoft)
 * Rock Prodigy
 * Computer Courses in Music - Ear Training (Schott)

List of Websites for Music Education

 * Easy Ear Training
 * Music Delta
 * Guitarbots
 * Songs2See