ShIFT: A Semi-haptic Interface for Flute Tutoring

Traditional instrument learning procedure is time-consuming; it begins with learning music notations and necessitates layers of sophistication and abstraction. Haptic interfaces open another door to the music world for the vast majority of talentless beginners when traditional training methods are not effective. However, the existing haptic interfaces can only be used to learn specially designed pieces with great restrictions on duration and pitch range due to the fact that it is only feasible to guide a part of performance motion haptically for most instruments. Our study breaks such restrictions using a semi-haptic guidance method. For the first time, the pitch range of the haptically learned pieces go beyond an octave (with the fingering motion covers most of the possible choices) and the duration of learned pieces cover a whole phrase. This significant change leads to a more realistic instrument learning process. Experiments show that semi-haptic interface is effective as long as learners are not "tone deaf". Using our prototype device, the learning rate is about 30% faster compared with learning from videos.