Evaluation of a Sound Quality Visual Feedback System for Bow Learning Technique in Violin Beginners: An EEG Study

Abstract

Current music technologies can assist in the process of learning to play a musical instrument and provide objective measures for evaluating the improvement of music students in concrete music tasks. In this paper, we investigated the effects of a sound quality visual feedback system (SQVFS) in violin learning. In particular, we studied the EEG activity of a group of participants with no previous violin playing experience while they learned to produce a stable sound (regarding pitch, dynamics, and timbre) in order to find motor learning biomarkers in a music task. Eighteen subjects with no prior experience in violin playing were divided into two groups: participants in the first group (experimental group, N = 9) practiced with instructional videos and offline feedback from the SQVFS provided in alternation with their performance, while participants in a second group (control group, N = 9) practiced with the instructional videos only. A third group of violin experts (players with more than 6 years of experience) performed the same task for comparative purposes ( N = 7). All participants were asked to perform 20 trials (4 blocks of 5 trials) consisting of a violin bowing exercise while their EEG activity and their produced sound was recorded. Significant sound quality improvements along the session were found in all participants with the exception of participants in the expert group. In addition, participants in the experimental group showed increased interest in the learning process and significant improvement after the second block not present in the control group. A significant correlation between the levels of frontal gamma band power and the sound improvement along the task was found in both the experimental and control group. This result is consistent with the temporal binding model which associates gamma band power with the role of integrating (binding) information processed in distributed cortical areas. Task complexity demands more cognitive resources, more binding and thus, gamma band power enhancement, which may be reduced as the demanded task begins to be automated as it is likely to be the case in both beginners groups.

Real-Time Sound and Motion Feedback for Violin Bow Technique Learning: A Controlled, Randomized Trial

“…What is more, if throughout the session the beginner's results of those potential descriptors resemble those of an expert, we will consider that the participant has improved his/her results in those specific variables. As already shown in previous research (Romaní et al, 2015 ; Blanco and Ramirez, 2019 ), we expected that variables, such as dynamic stability or pitch stability would be potential descriptors of the quality of the generated sound. We also expected descriptors, such as bow skewness (i.e., how straight is the bow during the performance) could be a potential descriptor of violin performance as has already been used in previous studies (Van Der Linden et al, 2011 ).…”

“…All the data was processed in Matlab (MATLAB, 2010 ), analyzed in Weka (Frank et al, 2016 ), and in SPSS (IBM Corp, 2011 ). All the raw data, wav files and statistics for each participant are freely available from Zenodo (Blanco et al, 2020 , 2021 ).…”

“…Sound quality features were extracted in the same manner as in Blanco and Ramirez ( 2019 ). We used the Yin algorithm (Llimona, 2015 ) to extract the fundamental frequency (f0), instantaneous power, and aperiodicity from the audio signal of each trial using a window size of 33 ms with a hop size of 0.7 ms.…”

“…By using some of the previous audio descriptors, such as dynamic stability or pitch stability , in a previous study we implemented an offline sound quality visual feedback system (SQVFS) (Blanco and Ramirez, 2019 ). It was evaluated in an experiment with both expert violinists and non-violinists.…”

Using Data Assimilation for Quantitative Electroencephalography Analysis

“…Regarding the changes in the gamma band, this can be certainly related to the process of looking at a paragraph, remembering it, and then writing it with a specific keyboard layout. Besides this, the gamma band is known to control coupling perception, which is associated with motor skills and learning [ 54 , 55 ].…”