Development of a Student Centered Educational Design

for Piano Playing and Singing Skills

Katsuko T. Nakahira and Muneo Kitajima

Nagaoka University of Technology, 1603-1 Kamitomiokamachi, Nagaoka, Niigata, Japan

Abstract. One of challenging subjects for education is construction of skill trans-

fer environment. As an effort to pursue this challenge, we have engaged in devel-

opment of piano playing and singing skill transfer education for years. In this pa-

per, we propose a student centered educational design for skill transfer by adopt-

ing the Cognitive Chrono-Ethnography method. We constructed a relation map

for piano playing and singing skills and derived 15 critical parameters that should

affect the performance of the students. We observed the activities of elite mon-

itors’ while they used the educational design we developed. The collected data

were analyzed in terms of the critical parameters, and we found that we could

classify them into a set of “syntax” parameters and a set of “semantic” parame-

ters. We conclude the skills associated with the former is more easily trained by

a student centered educational design than those associated with the latter.

1 Introduction

It is a challenging topic to treat “skill transfer education” from the viewpoint of “student

centered design.” This paper speciﬁcally focuses on the skill transfer education in the

ﬁeld of “piano playing and singing”, which has been applied to undergraduate students

aiming at obtaining teacher’s license for kindergarten or elementary school.

Educational design for skill transfer consists of two types of knowledge transfer

from trainer to trainee. The ﬁrst type is teaching explicit knowledge, which includes

physically observable measures. For example, Hirai et al. [1] developed a system that

focuses on the pitch of trainee’s singing. The system tried to cure their poor pitch rec-

ognized by the pitch detection technique by presenting differences between the correct

pitch and the trainee’s wrong pitch. The second is teaching implicit knowledge, which

includes semantic knowledge such as how to express appropriate emotion in singing.

The typical educational design for piano playing and singing so far, however, has only

dealt with the ﬁrst type of knowledge transfer, in which a trainer normally points out

problematic places in the trainee’s performance by comparing ideal performance with

his/her performance in terms of the observable measures. However, this educational de-

sign has serious limitations, i.e., the second type of knowledge transfer would never

happen since unmeasurable features, e.g., mood of singing, facial expression while

singing, and so on, would never be trained.

Traditionally, educational design for piano playing and singing has paid little at-

tention to the second type of skill transfer because it is believed that “explicit” knowl-

edge transfer from trainer to trainee should be trained ﬁrst, in this ﬁeld. Indeed, explicit

T. Nakahira K. and Kitajima M..

Development of a Student Centered Educational Design for Piano Playing and Singing Skills.

DOI: 10.5220/0004604301460151

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments (IDEE-2013), pages 146-151

ISBN: 978-989-8565-65-5

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

knowledge consisting of observable measures is one of the important elements in the

skill, and therefore the level of skill would be quantiﬁed easily by using these measures.

However, equally important would be qualitative measures, which would not be able to

be measured objectively but only to be evaluated subjectively.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an educational design for piano playing and

singing that is capable of transferring skill related to not only explicit knowledge but

also implicit knowledge. In order to explore speciﬁcations of such an educational de-

sign, we adopted a methodology called Cognitive Chrono-Ethnography (CCE), which

was successfully applied to understand people’s daily behavior [2], for studying how

trainees interact with and utilize a proposed educational design in real educational set-

tings, which would eventually lead to an appropriate speciﬁcation of student-centered

educational design for piano playing and singing skill transfer.

Skill transfer in piano playing and singing is important due to the following two rea-

sons. The ﬁrst is that it involves both explicit knowledge transfer and implicit knowl-

edge transfer, and they interact each other in various ways, making the study a big

challenge and a lot of implications to student-centered educational design would de-

rive. The second is related to the special condition in Japan. When someone wants to

become a teacher in kindergarten or elementary school in Japan, he/she has to pass the

teacher employment exams including an item of piano playing and singing. Due to this,

institutions of pre-school/elementary school teacher education have several courses to

train the skill necessary for piano playing and singing. However, the courses are usually

difﬁcult to run effectively for transferring skills because of the large number of students,

typically more than 100, participating in the courses. One of the solutions for the prob-

lem of difﬁculty in effective skill transfer is to develop a student-centered educational

design for the complex piano playing and singing skill transfer.

The educational design we have explored so far [4–6] focused on transferring skills

required for simultaneous piano playing and singing. Nakahira et al. [6] reported that

the design was successful to improve the learners’ performance. The design consisted

of the following three elements:

(i) having the trainee watch a video of the model performance for the purpose of build-

ing mental image of the performance goal,

(ii) having the trainee mimic the model performance while referring to guidance com-

ments added on the musical score, and video-record the performance, and

(iii) having the trainee submit the video and critically review his/her own performance.

This is an important step towards the useful student-centered educational design.

However, it was impossible to identify whether (i) or (ii) contributed more effectively

in the design. We need to have a deeper understanding of the mechanism of the im-

provement for developing better student-centered educational design. This can be done

by disentangling what happened in (i) and (ii) by applying a methodology for studying

people’s behavior in the real world settings, such as CCE.

2 Methodology

In this research, we adopted CCE, developed by Kitajima et al. [2], to study the trainee’s

skill acquisition process in the real-world setting. CCE consists of the following six

147

steps; (1)Choose the ﬁeld of study, (2)Deﬁne critical parameters, (3)Recruit elite mon-

itors, i.e., representative subjects in the space deﬁned by the critical parameters, (4)Ob-

serve elite monitors’ behavior in the study ﬁeld, (5)Deﬁne a space for representing the

observed phenomena, and (6)Analyze the observed behavior from the viewpoint of the

critical parameters. In short, a CCE study would provide detailed descriptions for the

representativepeople’s behaviorsin the study ﬁeld which is characterized by a set ofim-

portant, or critical, parameters. The training environment of piano playing and singing

in a student centered educational design would be characterized by a set of parameters

and trainees’ behaviors would be analyzed in terms of the critical parameters to derive

which parameters are effective for the training. In the study reported in this paper, we

analyzed the trainees’ behaviors observed in the educational design elements.

2.1 The Field of Student-centered Educational Design

This section describes the ﬁeld of the study where the student-centered educational

design was deployed. We describe the motivation, the selection of elite monitors in the

study, and the results of observation in the ﬁeld.

Motivation. The motivation of the study was to clarify the effectiveness of the use of

multimedia contents including the model performance and that of annotated musical

scores, used in the steps (i) and (ii) of the educational design. This would be done

by comparing students’ performances in two different conditions. If there is no differ-

ence in the improvement of students’ performance when we only use annotated musical

scores compared with the case in which we introduce both education practices, the an-

notated musical scores and multimedia contents including the model performance, one

can conclude that, in order to transfer skills, it is sufﬁcient to use annotated musical

scores. If there are signiﬁcant differences in the improvement of students’ performance

between these two cases, it may give us a clear indication that multimedia contents

including the model performance are important in transferring skills. As such, we con-

ducted an education practice, focusing only on the use of annotated musical scores.

In doing education practice and analyzing students performance, our main viewpoint

Start

record studentsÕ playing

submit their video files

finish?

check

annotated note

make report

End

No Yes

Fig.1. The educational de-

sign.

Length of

musical notes and rests

Tempo

Pronunciation

finger movement

Feel of the song

Understanding for

articulation

Recognition of points

where the student tends

to make an error

establishment for

implicit skill level

Balance in sound volume between

singing voice and the piano

enunciation

conveying

means of lyrics

rich facial expression

correct playing

from knowledge acquisition

to its realization

from image training for understanding

unknown musical number

to detail analysis for playing

Skill level acquisition from

model performance video

Knowledge acquisition from

annotated musical score

Balance in sound volume between

right and left hands

Fig.2. The relation map for elemental skills of piano play-

ing and singing.

148

was on how the students’ piano playing and singing performance improved. We stud-

ied it by using 1) self-analysis reports by students themselves, and 2) comments by the

instructors after their video analysis.

Elite Monitors. In this practice, the proposed learning approach was applied to 10 third

year undergraduate students and one graduate student in K Women’s University. The

target students attended the class of “Children’s Music I” which treats the elementary

course of piano playing and singing. When earning their credit, they have improved

their skill of piano playing and singing by themselves.

Observation. The approach is shown in Figure 1. First, each student selected one or

two songs that she wanted to practice for simultaneous piano playing and singing, took

a video of her performance using a digital camera, and submitted the video to a desig-

nated server via a Web page. Later, she was given an annotated musical score created

according to the process described in Fukami et al. [?], and practiced the song, by using

the annotated score. After about one week, she took a second video of her performance,

and submitted it to the server. At the same time, she was requested to submit a report

describing how her performance had changed by using the annotated musical score.

2.2 The Relation Map for Elemental Skills of Piano Playing and Singing

Figure 2 shows a map that represents the relationship among the elemental skills of

piano playing and singing, from which we can construct a set of critical parameters and

the space for representing observed phenomena. In general, the music playing consists

of skills necessary for managing “syntactic” and “semantic” knowledge. The syntactic

knowledge concerns correct mimic of symbol, such as notes/rests/time, signature/meter,

/· · ·. On the other hand, the semantic knowledge includes phrase expression with ref-

erence to the musical symbols, such as musical terminology/sign of dynamics/· · ·. In

case of singing, the player needs the skills not only to understand and imitate musical

symbols but also to understand the meaning of lyric and so on.

To improve the trainee’s piano playing and singing skill, he/she has to acquire the

following three elemental skills: (1)store the symbols/musical symbols in their mem-

ories, (2)synchronize the knowledge of symbols/musical symbols with ﬁngers/body

moto, and (3)cultivate their sensitiveness. The ﬁrst skill is just to store information in

their memories, so we do not need to make any innovation here; the third is too difﬁcult

to educate; but the second deserves further considerations and we identiﬁed 15 elements

to be considered for education of skills.

Synchronized with the Knowledge and Moto (7): lengths of musical notes and rests,

tempo, ﬁnger movements, pronunciation, articulation, enunciation, breath,

Basic Skill for Realizing Sensitiveness (7): feel of the song, conveying meaning of

lyrics, facial expression, balance in sound volume between right and left hands, balance

in sound volume between singing voice and the piano, posture during performance, at-

tention to breathing,

Compound Skill (1): recognition of points where the student tends to make an error.

Based on these considerations, we came up with the skill map deﬁned by these

elements. In CCE, these elements serve as critical parameters, and the skill map is used

as the initial expression space to represent the observations to be collected in this study.

149

Table 1. Students’ self-evaluation of their performance before and after checking annotated mu-

sical scores. The level A means “improved their playing”. The level B means “not improved their

playing”. The level C means “no change”. The level F means “They did well even before the use

of the annotated score”. Each level’s unit is “%”.

level

Analysis item

A B C F

(1) Lengths of musical notes and rests 72.7 9.1 0.0 18.2

(2) Finger movement 63.6 18.2 0.0 18.2

(3) Feel of the song

54.5 18.2 18.2 9.1

(4) Recognition of points where the student tends to make an error

45.5 0.0 36.4 18.2

(5) Tempo

45.5 27.3 9.1 18.2

(6) Pronunciation

45.5 18.2 9.1 27.3

(7) Articulation

45.5 18.2 36.4 0.0

(8) Conveying meaning of lyrics 36.4 36.4 9.1 18.2

(9) Facial expressions

36.4 36.4 18.2 9.1

(10) Balance in sound volume between right and left hands 36.4 54.3 0.0 9.1

(11) Enunciation

27.3 45.5 9.1 18.2

(12) Balance in sound volume between singing voice and the piano

27.3 36.4 27.3 9.1

(13) Posture during performance 18.2 9.1 18.2 54.5

(14) Breaths

18.2 27.3 0.0 54.5

(15) Attention to breathing

9.1 18.2 27.3 36.4

3 Results and Discussion

Table 1 shows the results. We classiﬁed the results into three categories by using the

contents described in the students skill improvement reports: (a)almost improved

through this training ((1) ∼ (7)), (b)not improved through this training ((8) ∼ (12)),

(c)no need to improve because of their feeling that they have already acquired the skills

((13)∼ (15)).

In this training, the skill elements which students feel they can make improvement

using the annotated scores are almost included in such aspect as “synchronized with

the knowledge and moto.” On the other hand, students feel they cannot make any im-

provement using the annotated scores are almost included in such items as basic skill

for realizing sensitiveness.

We derived the means for students’ skills modiﬁcation by inferring from these re-

sults. For training of synchronization of the knowledge with moto, understanding and

memorizing the annotations is one necessary condition for their skill modiﬁcation to

happen. Another skill modiﬁcation occurred through this training was “feeling of the

song and articulation.” However, most skill modiﬁcations concerning realizing sensi-

tiveness did not occur through this training, including especially “conveying meaning

of lyrics”, “enunciation”,“facial expressions.” This suggests that the modiﬁcation check

for these elements should require external evaluations.

These results lead the students’ centered design for education in piano playing and

singing. In case of university students, they have ability of self-instruction for the skills.

As shown in this paper, however, some skill elements would be easily self-instructed

but the others not. The results of our CCE study clearly showed those skill elements in

piano playing and singing that would be easily self-instructed.

150

4 Conclusions

In this paper, we focused the student centered design for education in skill transfer by

using the example of piano playing and singing. We followed the CCE methodology

to identify critical parameters and understand the trainees’ behaviors while they used

the student-centered educational design for piano playing and singing skill transfer.

We deﬁned 15 critical parameters to observe trainees’ skill, and constructed the rela-

tion map as the trainees’ statements representation. After the observation, we analyzed

trainees’ playing video and their reports in terms of the critical parameters. The results

showed that the parameters were conform to representation of trainees’ skill statement,

namely which elements they acquired or not. It indicated that the skill elements related

syntax was good for self-instruction but the elements related semantic needed exter-

nal help such as view-to-view instruction. Furthermore, we classiﬁed the elements for

enabling/disabling self-instruction. We also showed that the annotated musical scores

developed by using the ADDIE process was well functioned in the student centered

design, which meant that the important points to construct the design.

Acknowledgements

The study described in this paper has been partially funded by the Scientiﬁc Research

Expense Foundation C Representative: Muneo Kitajima (24531274).

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