Maestoso

As an adult, it becomes difficult to find efficient music education applications. Learning how to read and write music without the structure and aid of a teacher-taught class can prove to be a daunting task. Alternatives include signing up for music classes at a local college or signing up for a Coursera course. Online classes have professors and peers that provide feedback to the user's work online. A Massive Open Online Course such as Coursera offers numerous introductory level musicianship courses that teach students the basics of music theory. It guides users from learning the staff, all the way to learning Neopolitan chords. Through MOOCs, the creator of the course creates quizzes and assignments that the students complete. While these choices prove to be successful in teaching people the basics in reading music, these options provide setbacks such as cost to take the course, grading based off of inconsistent peer reviews, and tedious methods of checking answers. For example, some music questions require a picture response which consists of writing their response by hand, taking a picture of the response, and then uploading it. In order to provide feedback, peer reviewers and the professor have to download the uploaded images one by one. This method is monotonous, tedious, time consuming, and if the picture contains sloppy answers, bad lighting, blurry nature, or barely visible answers. Not only do the peer and professor go through every single submission, but the user has to wait for the peer or professor to finish grading every other submission in order to receive feedback. Despite these limitations, there are no adequate solutions. The only other music education opportunities are geared for children. Music applications available to users are applications that are made for seasoned musicians who have had exposure to reading and writing music. These applications act as electronic music paper. The only way for users to be able to use the already available applications is to have a solid understanding of reading and writing music. There is a lack of music education applications for adults. If it has been possible to create educational interfaces for Japanese Kanji, mathematical problem solving, drawing faces, and for mechanical physics, then there should already be an educational interface devoted to teaching the art of reading music. In order to combat the lack of sketch-based music educational interfaces, we present Maestoso: a music education application that takes advantage of sketch recognition algorithms such as the \$1 and Hausdorff algorithms. Maestoso is a pen based system that guides users through interactive lessons, challenges, and tutorials. Maestoso allows users to learn how to read and write music at their own pace as well as liberates users from waiting for feedback from a professor or peer. This grants autonomy to professionals and pre professional users in the process of building their musicianship skills. Maestoso requires no other equipment besides a computer. The drawing aspect of Maestoso can be improved with the use of a Wacom Bamboo tablet. We hypothesize that sketch recognition can be applied to music education in order to provide users with favorable and successful outcomes. Ultimately, the purpose of Maestoso is to catalyze a new dimension of music education and to augment the domains of educational sketch-recognition based interfaces. Maestoso's versatility will allow the user the option of either learning the foundations of music independently or alongside a structure class environment.