MusicJacket — combining motion capture and vibrotactile feedback to teach violin bowing

We describe MusicJacket, which is a wearable system to support the teaching of good posture and bowing technique to novice violin players. The system uses an inertial motion capture system to track the following in real time: 1) whether the player is holding the violin correctly and 2) the player’s bowing action and whether it deviates from a target trajectory. We provide the musicians with vibrotactile feedback about their bowing and posture using vibration motors that are positioned on their arms and torso. We describe a user study with novice violin players that compared a group who was trained using vibrotactile feedback with a control group who only received conventional teaching. We found that vibrotactile feedback is effective at improving novices’ straight bowing technique and that half of these subjects continued to show improved bowing technique even when they no longer received vibrotactile feedback. None of the control subjects who received the same number of training sessions using conventional teaching techniques showed a comparable improvement