Meta-instrument and Natural User Interface: a New Paradigm in Music Education

Music is gaining a growing role in children and teenager education, but playing music is not as natural as listening, requiring a large amount of time to spend in learning how to play a music instrument. Since a number of technical skills should be acquired through practice, this is a strong limitation for educational contexts where student’s time is a limited resource. The meta-instrument is a new paradigm for music instruments that overcomes these limitations and enables the student to instantly execute a music score without a specific training. Thanks to the natural ability of the human beings to tap the music, the meta-instrument moves the interaction level to the timing, the interpretation, and the natural interaction, embedding the pitch control in its smart logic implementation. The typical interaction of a natural user interface is applicable to a meta-instrument because it can emulate both a traditional music instrument and a virtual one. The student can play a music instrument regardless to the interaction mode, thus focusing on interpretation rather than on playing. The proposed meta-instrument framework refers to multiple and heterogeneous contents applying the specification of IEEE 1599, an XML-based standard for full representation of music.