The Piano Tutor

The Piano Tutor project developed an interactive, intelligent, multimedia tutor for beginning piano students. It worked really well, and it is a shame that the technology has not yet made it into a consumer product. It is licensed to one company on a non-exclusive basis, so there's hope.
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Dannenberg, Sanchez, Joseph, Saul, Joseph, and Capell, “An Expert System for Teaching Piano to Novices,” in Proceedings of the 1990 International Computer Music Conference, Glasgow, Scotland U.K. September 10-15, 1990. Ed. Stephen Arnold. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, 1990. pp. 20-23.

An early, short report on the Piano Tutor.
ABSTRACT: The Piano Tutor is a computer system for teaching beginning piano students. The system is highly interactive, with an expert system to analyze student performances and a multi-media presentation system to deliver instruction. Score following, which matches performances against a model, is used as the basis for detecting student errors. The Piano Tutor gives intelligent feedback and help rather than just listing all errors that are detected. The curriculum is organized into a set of lessons that are automatically chosen byt he system according to students' needs.
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Dannenberg, “Combining Intelligence, Media and Interaction in the Piano Tutor,” in Multimedia: Uses, Misuses and Usability of a Revolutionary User Interface, 1992 Symposium Proceedings, Metropolitan Chapter of the Human Factors Society, pp. 15-18, 1992.

You probably won't find this in your library. I tried to cover some of the "multimedia" aspects of the Piano Tutor in this paper written for a symposium. The chapter in Multimedia Interface Design covers roughly the same ideas:

Dannenberg and Joseph. "Human-Computer Interaction in the Piano Tutor." In Blattner and Dannenberg, eds., Multimedia Interface Design, ACM Press, pp. 65-78, 1992. (Also published in Chinese, 1994.)


Dannenberg, Sanchez, Joseph, Capell, Joseph, Saul, “A Computer-Based Multi-Media Tutor for Beginning Piano Students,” Interface - Journal of New Music Research, 19(2-3), 1990, pp. 155-173.

ABSTRACT:A fairly early but detailed report on the Piano Tutor. Most of the stuff in this article was implemented as described, so it is a pretty good architectural description.

The Piano Tutor provides computer-based instruction to beginning piano students. Intended as a supplement to traditional instruction, the Piano Tutor helps students by correcting mistakes before they become ingrained through practice and by teaching new material as soon as the student is ready. The Piano Tutor combines an expert system with state-of-the-art music recognition software and multimedia output devices to provide a stimulating learning environment that tailors instruction to the student's needs.

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Dannenberg, Sanchez, Joseph, Joseph, Saul, and Capell, “Results from the Piano Tutor Project,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Arts and Technology Symposium, Connecticut College, (March 1993), pp. 143-150.

This is the only paper written after the project was completed. It is a short paper about what we learned and includes the results from our pilot study.
ABSTRACT: The Piano Tutor combines an expert system and multimedia technology to form an interactive piano teaching system. Important elements of the Piano Tutor are: (1) the use of score-following software to interpret student performances, (2) the use of extensive multimedia to create a natural dialog with the student, (3) an expert system to analyze student mistakes and give pertinent multimedia feedback, and (4) the use of Instructional Design theory to develop an extensive curriculum that can be tailored automatically to individual student needs. Results from a preliminary assessment of the Piano Tutor are presented.
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