The Effect of Isomorphic Pitch Layouts on the Transfer of Musical Learning †

Sophia Stanford,Jennifer Macritchie,Andrew Milne

doi:10.3390/app8122514

Abstract

The physical arrangement of pitches in most traditional musical instruments—including the piano and guitar—is non-isomorphic, which means that a given spatial relationship between two keys, buttons, or fretted strings can produce differing musical pitch intervals. Recently, a number of new musical interfaces have been developed with isomorphic pitch layouts where these relationships are consistent. Since the nineteenth century, it has been widely considered that isomorphic pitch layouts facilitate the learnability and playability of instruments, particularly when a piece is transposed into a different key; however, prior to this paper, this has not been experimentally tested. To address this, we investigated four different pitch layouts to examine whether isomorphism facilitates retention and transfer of musical learning within and across keys. Both non-musicians and musicians were tested on two training tasks: two immediate retention tasks and a transfer task. Each participant played every task on two distinct layouts—one being an isomorphic layout (Wicki or Bosanquet), the other being a minimally adjusted non-isomorphic version. For musicians, isomorphism was found to facilitate transfer of learning to a novel task; for non-musicians, the results were mixed. This study provides insight into features that are important to music instrument design.

Highlights

Music instrument learning is a domain commonly associated with numerous social, emotional and cognitive benefits
The above advantages of isomorphic layouts have been proposed since the nineteenth century [20,21,22]; despite this long history and the recent development of multiple music interfaces utilising isomorphic pitch layouts (e.g., Array Mbira [23], Thummer [14], AXiS-49 [11], Musix Pro [24], LinnStrument [12], Lightpad Block [13], Terpstra [25]), no study has directly compared isomorphic and non-isomorphic layouts. To address this long-standing, but untested suggestion, in this study, we investigated whether the learnability and playability of a musical instrument increase with the use of isomorphic pitch layouts both within and, crucially, across keys
In the principal task—the transfer task—directional hypothesis tests showed strong evidence that performances in the trained key were better on isomorphic layouts than on non-isomorphic layouts

Summary

Introduction

Music instrument learning is a domain commonly associated with numerous social, emotional and cognitive benefits. These include increased self-esteem [1,2], increased sense of social identity [3,4], and the provision of a medium for self-expression [5]. In an age where computers are so prevalent and technological advances are constant, it seems desirable for musical instruments to advance so as to increase accessibility to the many benefits of music learning. None of these have achieved widespread or “mainstream” acceptance. This may be due to a lack of clear and agreed upon guidelines as to what the important features of successful musical instruments

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Discussion

Conclusion