Abstract
Music plays an important part in the lives of people from an early age. Many parents invest in music education of various types for their children as arts and music are of economic importance. This leads to a new trend that the STEAM education system draws more and more attention from the STEM education system that has been developed over several years. For example, parents let their children listen to music since they were in the womb and invest their money in studying music at an early age, especially for playing and learning musical instruments. As far as education is concerned, assessment for music performances should be standardized, not based on the individual teacher’s standard. Thus, in this study, automatic assessment methods for piano performances were developed. Two types of piano articulation were taken into account, namely “Legato” with vibration notes using sustain pedals and “Staccato” with detached notes without the use of sustain pedals. For each type, piano sounds were analyzed and classified into “Good”, “Normal”, and “Bad” categories. The study investigated four approaches for this task: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The experiments were conducted using 4680 test samples, including isolated scale notes and kids’ songs, produced by 13 performers. The results show that the CNN approach is superior to the other approaches, with a classification accuracy of more than eighty percent.
Highlights
It is believed that by employing new teaching methods or education systems, students can be able to obtain good grades and good jobs and connect and combine the critical areas of their learning with meeting various needs of the 21st century
Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed piano performance assessment approaches with respect to two types of music articulation
The data were further divided into two subsets of experiments, which is the Legato part using the “vibrato” notes with the sustain pedal and the Staccato part using detached notes without the support pedals to investigate the distribution of the rate of accurate prediction across the three categories: “Good”, “Normal”, and “Bad”
Summary
It is believed that by employing new teaching methods or education systems, students can be able to obtain good grades and good jobs and connect and combine the critical areas of their learning with meeting various needs of the 21st century. Playing musical instruments helps to improve listening, recognition, and voice differentiation and helps in filtering background noise. These skills can be employed in normal daily routines; for example, students have to concentrate in class despite various distractions. While piano players are reading the score, their left and right hands have to be coordinated and systematized simultaneously. Their feet have to control the pedals at the same time, which means that both the hands and feet are used and must be coordinated. This allows cognitive development and body balance at the same time
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
