Observations and Interviews

We interviewed much more than three people, but the three interviews that stood out the most are characterized below.

Novice Piano Player

(I'm talking about Pramod's Kevin here)

School Band Member and Wannabe A Cappella Singer

This interviewee was fairly familiar with music, having some experience with piano, violin, drum, and choir. When we asked him about differentiating notes, he was very excited, and said that it was super important to him, since he wanted to sing a cappella. He was primarily interested in sight reading, but had actively spent time training his ability to differentiate notes. 

Most interesting to us was that he had a very specific way of training his own ability to read notes.

What we also found interesting is that he doesn't really believe music can be taught without human interaction. He emphasized that reinforcement from a person when you're learning is important, and it would be important to get consistent, helpful feedback from Want something more than "you did this right or wrong"
Machine measures of quality are more skeptical.

Guitar Player

1. Guitar. Advanced novice, but haven't played in years. Some singing.
2. No. Some relative pitch.
3. Yes, definitely, and especially if he were going to be playing more.
4. Play a guitar/piano, never thought about training it in isolation.
5. When learning the instrument, it was one of the important things to learn, so yes, then.
6. No, not to get good at it.
7. Internet was never an option, back when he was learning, so hadn't considered it.
If now, maybe for specific skills, he would go online to learn, but mostly due to time
constraints.
Comments: a Media Lab reseacher (XiaoXiao in Tangible Media) was interested in remote teaching.
Involved teacher's hands in front of your hands on a piano keyboard.

Other Interviewees

Other people we interviewed included someone with perfect pitch who believed the skill "couldn't be taught to an adult."

Many people expressed that differentiating notes was a specific skill out of many, and something they wanted to practice when they were actively learning to play an instrument.

User Classes

  1. Novice Piano Players - Piano players are the main body of our target users simply because there are a lot of them. Most of the people we interviewed had attempted to learn piano at one point or another, and noted that note differentiation was one of the skills they would like to improve at.
  2. Other instrument players - We discovered that some of our interviewees were novice guitar players, and we believe they're a significant part of the population as well. Their goals are similar to that of the piano player, but we must keep in mind that the interface they are familiar with is significantly different from the piano players.

It's worth noting that our user classes do not explicitly address the needs of a cappella singers, because they are more interested in learning how to produce notes that are written, and those of people with perfect pitch, who don't have such needs.

Needs & Goals