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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 142 (2014) 311 - 317
CIEA 2014
Learning to Play a Musical Instrument in Adulthood - Challenges and Computer-mediated Solutions
Maria-Iuliana Dascalua*, Melania Comanb, Roxana Postelnicua, Cosmin Nichifora
aDepartment of Engineering in Foreign Languages, Politehnica University of Bucharest, 313 Splaiul Independentei, Bucharest 060042, Romania bFaculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, „Alexandru loan Cuza" University ofIasi, 3 Toma Cozma, Iasi 700554, Romania
Abstract
This article draws some directions in the field of music learning in adulthood, taking into account the constraints an adult has: a different style of assimilating new knowledge, less time to invest in hobbies, a lower availability to spend time on activities which don't bring them visible profit. In order to meet the need of an adult to play a musical instrument, computer-mediated solutions are an easy and cost-effective method. Therefore, the authors present an application "Touch & Listen" which imitates 3 musical instruments- piano, steel drum and harp, by offering the users graphical interfaces similar to the real ones and sounds similar to the ones produced when playing those instruments. Also, the users have the possibility to record their compositions and replay them or retrieve similar fragments on web. The application was developed using Java technologies in university laboratories, thus proving the role of universities in enhancing and encouraging continuous education, as a form of fulfilling adults' needs of self-development. The application can be used also as a composition instrument or as a search instrument: if the users can reproduce a small fragment from a song, they can easily find the entire song. A set of tests were made and positive results related to the efficiency of our tool for learning to play an instrument were registered. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. Thisisanopen access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Alexandru loan Cuza University. Keywords: music learning; learning in adulthood; virtual musical instrument; software to learn music
1. Introduction
Nowadays change is a stress factor, but also one of the best motivational tools for learning in adulthood. People express their willingness to change by approaching new ways of doing things: such is the learning of music in
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +40-740-917-410. E-mail address: maria.dascalu@upb.ro
1877-0428 © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Alexandru loan Cuza University.
doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.07.639
adulthood. The learning theories show that adults are competitive in nature and that in their learning processes, they prefer not being subjected to shame (as perceived by their own values paradigms) or to the ridicule of others. This makes art education, as well as many other adult courses difficult and approaches must be developed so as to ensure that the learners feel safe and welcome. We argue that using a suitable software tool makes music learning more possible in adulthood. The current paper presents such a tool, which simulates musical instruments, giving to the users the possibility to compose short musical pieces and also to search those fragments on the web. The tool is presented in the context of the challenges and reasons of learning in adulthood. Also, a short presentation of other computer-mediated solutions for music learning is provided.
2. Learning in adulthood
Why do adults learn? A simple paradigm, made up of the possible combination of competence and awareness (or consciousness) in regard to the perceived notion of knowledge shows us that all learners, but most of all adult learners, find themselves in one of these 4 stages (Adams, 2012): (1) unconsciously incompetent; (2) consciously incompetent; (3) consciously competent; (4) unconsciously competent or the expert stage. An adult (or the future learner) is unconsciously incompetent, when he/she is unaware of the fact that there are things one should know. An adult is consciously incompetent, when he/ she is faced with a challenge and admits that he/ she does not know as much as they thought they should. In regard to artistic education, it is usually a change of pace in one's life that triggers an interest in art; it is to say that most adults turn to art, in general and music in particular to enjoy themselves and to release stressful situations. Adult learners become consciously competent, when the adults know what they know and what they don't know and can make educated decisions on what to do or not do. Usually, for adult learners, every bit of knowledge is swiftly followed by application. Considering music learning for adults, the next conscious step is to forget all about performing an instrument outside their training room or in front of other people than their professor. An adult becomes unconsciously competent when one cannot really say how he/she can do things. According to (Gladwell, 2011) it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to get to this level of expertise, facts that have been confirmed by research undertaken by a team of German psychologists in the early 1990's, who have studied the practice habits of violin students from childhood to adulthood. One of the questions asked to the participants was "Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?". What they found was that most of the violinists who participated had started their violin training at roughly 5 years of age, with similar practice hours until 8 years of age, where some changed the number of hours dedicated to practice. Upon closer inspection of the data gathered, the researchers discovered that the truly gifted, elite performers had practiced an average of more than 10,000 hours, while the less able performers had only 4,000 hours of practice (Wisdom Group, 2013).
In the world of work, the above paradigm can become a source of stress in itself. Where does one get 10,000 hours to learn a trade, especially if they were to start at 40 years of age (and 10,000 hours amounts to roughly 5 years in a full-time job)? As adults are a competitive group, all types and all sources of learning are used to get a comparative advantage at the workplace. And the good news for all adult learners (and all learners in general) comes under the "first 20 hours" rule, which was developed by Josh Kaufmann (2012) and states that one can learn anything about a subject, provided one is willing to invest twenty full hours into studying it. The author explains the concept of the first 20 hours, offering a summary of his systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. He talks about methods showing adult learners how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. His research shows that by completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice, any adult can go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. His own example is how he learned to play the ukulele (a musical instrument from the guitar family, with four nylon or gut strings, originating in Hawaii) and his findings of how nowadays, all music genres seem to only use 4 keys-G, D, E minor and C, thus making music learning an easy challenge for any learner.
2.1. Learning for your profession or learning for your well-being
Learning for one's profession is usually approached with a sense of obligation. When it comes to adult learning, and especially with regard to professional trainings, a great emphasis is placed on solving problems, thus training
may be a suitable learning method. Also, professional trainings are where people attempt to borrow ideas from other people, to share experiences and to broaden their horizons. Learning for the job happens everywhere, but it is usually the structured form of professional training that creates the framework for organizing what one knows, can do and is willing to do, also known as the KSA set-knowledge, skill and attitude (Staman, Visscher, & Luyten, 2013).
Malcolm Knowles, as well as other important adult education researchers and specialists, identifies the reasons that motivate adults to learn and the ways in which they approach learning (Clapper, 2010). The reasons for learning have to do with a need to learn (caused by change in their work status, social status, etc.) or an interest to learn or a desire to learn, which are usually fueled with internal motivation. One of the hardest things about adult learning, as specialists found out, is to get them to learn when they don't inherently want to. The ways in which adults learn, on the other hand, pose another challenge. Adults usually get bored quickly, so any learning should take place with rapid changes of pace (usually a new trick every 9 to 15 minutes) and with the constant involvement of the learners, be it in debates, games, teamwork, etc., while approaching the issues and problems they have brought forward.
Learning for one's well-being may seem like the opposite of learning for one's profession. However, it is not. The only thing that enhances this perception is the fact that adults are used to put a "price tag" on the time spent on learning (as their opportunity cost to another type of activity) and thus tend to minimize the value of learning for oneself and one's wellbeing. First and foremost, one needs to define well-being, which is, according to the Webster dictionary "the state of being happy, healthy and prosperous" and according to Oxford dictionary "the state of being comfortable, happy or healthy". One conclusion we may draw from the previous phrase is that learning for one's well-being involves all types of learning, since obviously being prosperous has to do with some professional issues, even if we are simply talking about ways to alleviate stress or to improve conflicting relations at work.
But since what interests us is the part where "happy" and "healthy" are concerned, learning for one's well-being is that educative activity that contributes to a sense of meaning in the world, as well as belonging, participating, getting involved. Art education and art therapy go hand in hand to ensure the well-being of the learners. One of the most important things in an adult's life is to contribute creatively to one's life, family, community and the world. And while one can be overly competitive in the workplace and can strive for the 10,000 hour expertise level, when it comes to learning for well-being, one can always work towards learning the topics that matter to them, rekindle their love of learning and enjoy learning as the norm, rather than the exception caused by change.
The role of music in one's well-being was analyzed in different countries and contexts. Hill (2013) wrote a report dedicated to the arts and individual well-being, which shows the connection between involvement in arts and eight health and well-being indicators, such as health, mental health, volunteering, feeling stressed, and overall satisfaction with life. Pop music was found to have a positive effect on health-mental and physical, volunteering and life satisfaction, while classical music attendees show similar effects. Laukka (2007) published an article referring to the uses of music and the perceived well-being of the elderly, bringing to attention the various uses of music and the psychological aims that can be satisfied by listening to music, as researched by several specialists, e.g., DeNora (2000), Laiho (2004), Ruud (2008). Laukka (2007) discovered through questionnaires, journal analysis, and interviews that music helps change moods, enhances social communication and peer group identification, provides comfort and reduces loneliness. In fact, most studies have considered music making in all its forms and participation increases happiness factor (Hills & Argyle, 1998; Kreutz et al., 2004).
As research into the use and importance of music goes much further than that, and as the great majority of adults have, at one point in life, experienced a pleasant emotion when listening to music, singing or playing, the next logical step is determining how adult people start looking into ways of learning music.
2.2. Is music learning different from other types of learning?
Learning music has different facets and involves many body parts and both brain hemispheres and is usually hard to do, especially when one is at the beginning of their journey, but the good news is adults have a better chance to find a musical instrument they like, as they have had time to educate their music preferences.
When attempting to learn how to play a musical instrument, one has to think about several things, according to http://worldmusic.about.com/. First thing should be what kind of music one likes to listen to, as it has a direct impact on the kind of musical instrument that one leans into choosing. Second another important issue to consider is the reason why one wants to learn and the instances and events where one sees oneself playing an instrument. If
performing issues are out of the way, a question would be: would one rather play with an orchestra or group or would one rather play by oneself? That is how some choose guitar or drums, as opposed to piano or violin. Third question that might appear relates to the cost of the musical instrument and lessons. Fourth issue is whether there is space enough or whether the walls are thick enough to accommodate one's learning to play a musical instrument and the practice hours needed. Fifth aspect of learning to play a musical instrument is whether it will be easy to find a teacher, which is one of the most important things.
Other aspects one might consider is whether there are physical limitations (such as the weight of the musical instrument), the time one has to invest and how serious one is about it, whether one wants to play and sing at the same time, or whether one has to learn to read music. A practical and cost-efficient solution would be, in most cases, to use a virtual simulator of the musical instrument one wants to play at.
3. Computer-mediated Solutions for Music Learning
There are several software applications which can be used for musing learning. MusicPedia (www.musipedia.org) is an encyclopedia which has been inspired by Wikipedia, but it is not related to it and represents a vast collection of searchable tunes and musical themes. It suits the same principle as Wikipedia does, so that anybody can edit any tune found in the collection of MusicPedia. It is a tune search engine that allows users to search for melodies by different ways. For example, the user can find and identify the tune only by knowing the rhythm, or a segment of piano play, or simply by knowing the melodic contour. So, there are several ways the users can identify the desired tunes through: melody search, contour based search, piano based search and rhythm based search. The conventional way of searching by microphone is also available. After finding a tune, the user can learn how to sing or play it. Greenstone (http://www.nzdl.org/fast-cgi-bin/music/musiclibrary) represents a suite of software which helps building and sharing digital collections, generally of music. One of its strong points is that the users can simply organize their music collection and publish it on the Internet. It's a project started in New Zeeland and by the help of UNESCO. Another convenient is that the application is open-source. It initially started as a software program for educational purposes, such as in libraries, universities and schools. The web application is made in partnership with three strong institutes: New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and The Human Info NGO, based in Antwerp, Belgium. The main objective is to encourage people and students to develop and share digital libraries in order to place them in the public domain. Midomi (http://www.midomi.com/) is a music search tool in which you can find music by singing, whistling or humming, because it's powered by the user's voice and features an extensive digital music store with a growing collection of more than two million legal music tracks. You can listen to samples of original recordings or buy the full studio versions and play them on compatible music players. This database of searchable music allows you to connect with an online community that shares your musical interests and also to contribute by singing in its online recording studio. There you can create your own profile, share your songs with your friends, send them messages, see their pictures, collect ratings, receive feedback and get discovered. Themefinder (http://www.themefinder.org/) is a collaborative project of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) at Stanford University and the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at the Ohio State University. It can be used to search for musical themes for personal, teaching and non-commercial research purposes, by choosing the repertory, the key and its mode, by typing in the pitch, interval, scale degree, gross or refined contour, all of those being accompanied by indications. Currently there are three databases in which you can identify common themes: Western Classical Instrumental Music, European Folksongs, and Latin Motets from the sixteenth century. Matched themes are displayed on-screen in graphical notation. Currently, two methods are used to produce notated images. Neither of these tools provides support for a complete learning cycle.
Other applications use gamification to improve the process of music learning. Music Memory (http://www.knowledgeadventure.com/games/music-memory/) is an online brain game in which you must listen to the notes and then replay them by pressing the musical notes buttons. The players have 5 available lives per session. SlideBeats is a creative, fun and challenging two-player music memory game one can play anywhere with a friend, as it is a mobile application. The players can challenge each other's memory by recording and sending beats back and forth. Each of them has 3 lives and a number of items they can use to help keep them in the game, switch up the style or add different sound effects to their beats.
Musical instruments can be easily simulated via software applications. The Virtual Piano (www.virtualpiano.net/) is an application designed to simulate playing a piano (or similar musical instruments) on your computer or phone, online or offline (without an internet connection). The virtual piano is played using the keyboard and/or mouse and typically comes with many features found on a digital piano. Guitar Hero (http://www.guitarhero.com/) is an application which allows players to simulate playing songs as bands. There is also a guitar controller which can be used. The application is seen as a game: "The note colors and positions match those of the five fret keys on the guitar controller. Once the note(s) reach the bottom, the player must play the indicated note(s) by holding down the correct fret button(s) and hitting the strumming bar in order to score points. There is a window of time for hitting each note. Scoring in Guitar Hero is not affected by accuracy; as long as the note is hit within that window, the player receives the same number of points" (Barnett, Kahla, Kress, & Tate, 2011).
4. Touch&Listen , a Software to Learn How to Play a Musical Instrument
Touch&Listen is a software tool which allows the users to play a virtual instrument and afterwards to listen their own progress. The application was developed using Java technologies in university laboratories of the Department of Engineering in Foreign Languages, Politehnica University of Bucharest (PUB), Romania. The testing part was done in the same laboratories, by a group of students in computer science, French stream. The fact that the development and the first set of tests were made inside these laboratories proves the role of universities in enhancing and encouraging continuous education, as a form of fulfilling adults' needs of self-development.
4.1. Functional Description
Touch & Listen simulates three instruments: the piano, the harp and the steel drums. The classical guitar is available in most of the music applications, so by choosing different musical instruments we gave a note of uniqueness to our software. Each person has different tastes in various domains, especially in music. By incorporating these three instruments into Touch & Listen, we gave the users the possibility to gain diverse music knowledge. The main screen of the application is available in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Touch & Listen Interface
In Fig. 2 there are two playing modes available for the application: the piano mode and the steel drums mode. The user can easily navigate from one to another, using a suite of buttons. Also, a user can record on personal computer the tune he/ she has just created, for later audition. Thus, learning by doing becomes the learning method applied here: the tool can be used for self-education by adults who are computer literates. The application provides insight information about each available virtual instrument, as seen in Fig. 3. The information is available in two languages: English and French. Also, after recording a pierce of music, the user can search for that tune on internet. This can help the learner who knows only a fragment of a song and wants to learn the whole melody.
Fig. 2. Piano Mode vs. Steel Drums Mode
MuskMaker - Steel Drum Mode
Fig.3. Information Windows available in Touch & Listen
4.2. Technical Challenges
The application was developed in two steps: (1) processing of the sounds corresponding to each instrument; (2) developing the actual code. For obtaining the necessary sounds which have to be added in the software, one has to create and record the audio file for each sound and then to edit that file. A simple way to record electronically a musical sequence, so one can edit it later, comes right from Windows Operating System. One can also find in Windows the "Sound recorder" application. There, after pressing the "Start Recording" button, we play the audio file which contains multiple musical notes. When it's finished playing, we click on "Stop Recording" and we name our new WMA (Windows Media Audio) file. If we don't have an audio file containing musical notes, we can "create one" by using an online music application, such as "Virtual Keyboard" (http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/music/piano/index.htm), which includes many musical instruments. For editing the WMA file, the usage of the "Adobe Audition" program is required. Also, if by
any chance we obtain the audio files in MP3 format, we must convert them into WAV files, in order to have a better sound quality for our musical notes. Audacity is a program that helps us do the conversion only by opening the audio file and saving it with the wanted extension. The Touch & Listen application was written using Java 1.7.0_07 in NetBeans IDE 7.4.We used extensively the Java graphical libraries: Swing and AWT.
4.3. Benefits for Using Touch & Listen as a Learning Tool in Adulthood
The tool was tested by a group of students at the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages and the preliminary results were satisfactory: they concluded that the software was easy to use and helpful. Some of them have already known how to play the piano: for them, the tool was useful because of its search features. None of them knew how to play the steel drums or the harp: the tool simulated well the instruments, thus giving them a pleasant experience.
5. Conclusions and Future Work
Touch & Listen cannot be the only tool to be used in music learning, but can facilitate the adult learners to improve their skills related to playing instruments: it is cost-efficient, can be used any time and offers a commodious practice virtual room, as the solutions for learning which involve virtual experiences are proved to be successful (Moldoveanu, Morar, & Asavei, 2013; Moldoveanu et al., 2013; Moldoveanu, Balan & Moldoveanu, 2014). Adults learn better while interacting with the others, in a community, this is the reason for which, as future improvements, we want to add a feature to Touch & Listen which will permit the users to join music learning communities and to find peers with the same hobbies. The first tests of our tool prove that computer-mediated solutions are indeed a method to improve learning in adulthood, result sustained by our previous studies as well (Dascalu, Coman, & Dascalu, 2010).
The work has been funded by the Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013 of the Ministry of European Funds through the Financial Agreement POSDRU/159/1.5/S/132397.
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