Learning Advanced Skills on New Instruments

Sageev Oore

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

When learning a classical instrument, people often either take lessons in which an existing body of “technique” is de- livered, evolved over generations of performers, or in some cases people will “teach themselves” by watching people play and listening to existing recordings. What does one do with a complex new digital instrument? In this paper I address this question drawing on my expe- rience in learning several very different types of sophisticated instruments: the Glove Talk II real-time gesture-to-speech interface, the Digital Marionette controller for virtual 3D puppets, and pianos and keyboards. As the primary user of the first two systems, I have spent hundreds of hours with Digital Marionette and Glove-Talk II, and thousands of hours with pianos and keyboards (I continue to work as a professional musician). I will identify some of the under- lying principles and approaches that I have observed during my learning and playing experience common to these instru- ments. While typical accounts of users learning new inter- faces generally focus on reporting beginner’s experiences, for various practical reasons, this is fundamentally different by focusing on the expert’s learning experience.

Citation:

Sageev Oore. 2005. Learning Advanced Skills on New Instruments. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1176794

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Oore2005,
 abstract = {When learning a classical instrument, people often either take lessons in which an existing body of “technique” is de- livered, evolved over generations of performers, or in some cases people will “teach themselves” by watching people play and listening to existing recordings. What does one do with a complex new digital instrument? In this paper I address this question drawing on my expe- rience in learning several very different types of sophisticated instruments: the Glove Talk II real-time gesture-to-speech interface, the Digital Marionette controller for virtual 3D puppets, and pianos and keyboards. As the primary user of the first two systems, I have spent hundreds of hours with Digital Marionette and Glove-Talk II, and thousands of hours with pianos and keyboards (I continue to work as a professional musician). I will identify some of the under- lying principles and approaches that I have observed during my learning and playing experience common to these instru- ments. While typical accounts of users learning new inter- faces generally focus on reporting beginner’s experiences, for various practical reasons, this is fundamentally different by focusing on the expert’s learning experience.},
 address = {Vancouver, BC, Canada},
 author = {Oore, Sageev},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1176794},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {performance, learning new instruments },
 pages = {60--64},
 title = {Learning Advanced Skills on New Instruments},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2005/nime2005_060.pdf},
 year = {2005}
}