Supporting Musical Practice Sessions Through HMD-Based Augmented Reality

Abstract: Learning a musical instrument requires a lot of practice, which ideally, should be done every day. During practice sessions, students are on their own in the overwhelming majority of the time, but access to experts that support students "just-in-time" is limited. Therefore, students commonly do not receive any feedback during their practice sessions. Adequate feedback, especially for beginners, is highly important for three particular reasons: (1) preventing the acquirement of wrong motions, (2) avoiding frustration due to a steep learning curve, and (3) potential health problems that arise from straining muscles or joints harmfully. In this paper, we envision the usage of head-mounted displays as assistance modality to support musical instrument learning. We propose a modular concept for several assistance modes to help students during their practice sessions. Finally, we discuss hardware requirements and implementations to realize the proposed concepts.