Learning to play music is a challenge for most musicians, but the research of a team from the University of Waterloo can help musicians in training to find the right notes.
The Waterloo team analyzed a variety of YouTube videos that focused on learning music by ear and identified four simple ways in which musical learning technology can help possible musicians, helping people to memory while listening, limiting the reproduction of small fragments, identifying musical subsections to memorize and repeat the notes indefinitely.
“There are many electronic applications and tools to help learn for the ear of recorded music,” said Christopher Liscio, a recent Waterloo Master’s graduate in computer science and the main author of the study.
“But we see evidence that musicians do not seem to use them much, which makes us question whether these tools are really suitable for the task. When studying how people teach and learn how to play ear music in YouTube videos, we can try to understand what could help these ears learning musicians.”
The team studied 28 YouTube ears learning lessons, breaking each to examine how the instructors structured their teaching and how students would probably retain what they heard. Surprisingly, they discovered that very few creators or spectators were using existing digital learning tools to reproduce or manipulate reproduction speed despite their availability for more than two decades.
“We started this research by planning to build a specific tool for ear students, but then we realized that we could be reinforcing a negative pattern of construction tools without knowing what users really want,” said Dan Brown, a computer teacher in Waterloo. “Then we were excited when we realized that YouTube could be a useful resource for this research process.”