Interactive Generation of Musical Corpora for Piano Education: Opportunities and Open Challenges

Abstract

Learning to play a musical instrument such as a piano requires many hours of exercises, generally taken from a “method” book. These books are collections of progressive exercises intended to teach specific techniques and address the commonest mistakes and difficulties that players face while learning. One downside of these books is that the exercises are not personalized to the students and thus cannot address specific difficulties and characteristics of each learner. Given the many recent advances in the field of music generation, we propose that it should be possible to generate exercises automatically to form a personalized method for each student. The teacher would describe the characteristics of the student and their strengths and weaknesses to a software system, as well as the teaching goals that should be covered in the generated exercises, and the system would create exercises that are specific to the needs of the student and the concerns of the teacher, allowing for a more effective and engaging learning experience. In this paper, we describe a project trying to design such a system, stating research questions, describing the tentative methodology, and outlining its potential impact for both research in music generation and in computer-supported education.