Teaching Improvisational Skills Using Augmented Reality Systems

Posted on February 1, 2019 Updated on January 28, 2019

By Lauren H., Senior

(Photo Credit: https://www.music-ic.com/best-bass-guitars-guide/)

 

Improvisation combines a spontaneous performance of a communication of emotions and responses to other musicians. When I first started learning how to play instruments, anything involved with this was something that I struggled with. With so many options of what I could do, I always ended up getting overwhelmed and never knowing how to start.

As I believe that improvisation is an important skill—it can turn the focus of music more towards creativity and expression instead of just structured notation—I was determined to figure out a way to learn; but I had always wished that I had someone or something to help me along the way.

Because of this, I am now working on a project that will help teach these improvisational skills on a bass guitar. Whether you’re just starting or have been playing for years, the app I am creating aims to make these fundamentals of music education easy to understand through the use of augmented reality; AR (Augmented Reality) combines real and virtual worlds, real time interaction, and 3D registration of virtual and real objects.

The application will be created mainly by the use of XCode, which uses the programming language called Swift; from there, the application will be implemented onto a mobile device where it will be optimized for use with an iPad.

The app user will calibrate the program by taking two different pictures—one of the first fret and one of the twelfth fret. From there, the program will connect and track the these two locations and overlay a semi-transparent plane onto it in the video feed.

Creation of the semi-transparent plane (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

The user will then see small dots overlaid onto the plane that will guide them in regard to where to place their fingers. The dots will then change color based on the progression created by the random chord generator in the app.

Semi-transparent plane overlaid onto the fretboard of a bass (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

The chords in the random progression will be displayed over the four blank lines shown near the top of the screen. Along with showing the chords, the app will also display options to change the drum backing track and the BPM (beats per minute) that the progression runs at. The app will choose this progression by using a program I created to randomly pick a key (ex: D minor) from a select set and then randomly choose chords within that chosen key.

Complete random chord progression (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

 

Within the app, the user can enter a number (ex: 4) for the number of chords they want to have in their generated progression. From there, the program will first run through all of the key options available from a set list and randomly select one from the group.

Set list of keys the program can choose from (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

Once a key (ex: D minor) is selected, the program is given a new group which contains the scale degrees available for the chosen key.

Set list of scale degrees for D minor (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

With the key selected, the program then runs through a loop and randomly chooses the number of chords (ex: 4) that the user requested.

Loop that the program runs through (Photo Credit: Lauren Hagen)

The app is designed so that anybody of any skill level and pick it up and learn something from it. No matter how much experience they have, they will be able to learn something. Ultimately, this project is important to me because I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to better themselves musically, without being discouraged by the difficulty of trying to tackle it on their own.