Gamify the Audiation: The CrazySquare Project

Federica Caruso

, Tania Di Mascio

and Marco Pennese

DISIM, University of L’Aquila, Via Vetoio, L’Aquila, Italy

Istituto Giovanni Pascoli, Rieti, Rieti, italy

Keywords:

Gamiﬁcation, Audiation, Music, Playing Musical Instruments, Young Teenagers.

Abstract:

In a world in which a large amount of ICT game-based systems deal with the musical abilities without really

supporting a high level of musical education, CrazySquare, initially implemented as educational instrument

supporting the study of rhythm and its representation, currently represents a valid high level of musical edu-

cation system for teachers who want to involve their students in learning guitar in a professional way, i.e., to

be able to play what they hear in their brains (the audiation). CrazySquare has been inspired by the Gordon’s

theory, which consists of using a more direct approach to sound instead of the musical notation alone (e.g.,

solfeggio). It is speciﬁcally indicated for young teenagers (10 - 13 years old) that approach music and a musi-

cal instrument at the same time and for the ﬁrst time. It has been formalized after ten years of positive results,

obtained using the paper-based CrazySquare procedure adopted in Italian middle schools that introduced gam-

iﬁed elements for the audiation. The reported expert-based evaluation, indeed, encourage us to go ahead in the

taken direction.

1 INTRODUCTION

Millions of people listen to music every single day.

As a consequence, learning to play musical instru-

ments is something that many people have interest in.

However, learning to play musical instruments is for

many people a rather demanding task, that requires a

lot of time and a proper guidance; more often peo-

ple consider the musical education more than a de-

manding task. Nowadays, to support people in these

challenging tasks, three main solutions exist: musical

schools, private lessons, and ICT-tools, since musical

activities at main schools are often not sufﬁcient. In

Italy, musical teaching activities, at main schools, are

organized as follows (D.M. n.201, 1999):

• Primary School: 1 hour of musical education

taught by the primary teacher. The quality of the

teaching is based on its (not required) expertise.

• Middle School: 2 hours of musical education by

a professional music teacher + 2 hours of musi-

cal instrument training by a professional musical

instrument teacher.

In the Ministerial Decree 201/99 (D.M. n.201, 1999),

there are explicitly described what are the musical

education skills (e.g., agogic) that must be acquired

by children at the end of middle school (see for de-

tails Section 2) but there are no guidelines regarding

the pedagogical approaches to achieve them; the only

recommendations deal with the acquisition of a high

level of these musical education skills.

Musical education skills touch on all learning do-

mains, including the psycho-motor domain (the de-

velopment of motor skills), the cognitive domain (the

acquisition of music knowledge), and, in particu-

lar and signiﬁcant ways, the affective domain (the

learner’s willingness to receive, internalize, and share

what is learned), including music appreciation and

sensitivity. During the 20th century, many distinctive

approaches were developed (see e.g., (Willems, 1946)

and (Jaques-Dalcroze, 1921). More recently, Gordon

introduced the audiation to summarize the different

musical education skills. Audiation takes place when

we hear and comprehend music for which the sound is

no longer or may never have been present. One may

audiate when listening to music, performing from no-

tation, playing “by ear”, improvising, composing, or

notating music (Gordon, 2003).

The high level of music education skills, and then

the audiation, is guaranteed, at school, by the ex-

pertise of middle school teachers; at the same time,

teachers pointed out the lack of ICT-solutions sup-

porting the musical education as well as highlighted

by (Beck, 2017). In the same literature review, the au-

Caruso, F., Di Mascio, T. and Pennese, M.

Gamify the Audiation: The CrazySquare Project.

DOI: 10.5220/0007764900920099

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 92-99

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

thor highlights the diverse ICT-solutions related to the

music technology of education, concluding that they

are mainly commercially-driven and often not ade-

quately evaluated (Beck, 2017). This is in line with

the commercial trend of the new millennium, in which

the Internet plays an ever-increasing role in expand-

ing access to music-learning resources. On YouTube,

for instance, a plethora of instructional videos ex-

ist for learning to play virtually any musical instru-

ment; these are used not only by individuals, but they

are also being incorporated into educational frame-

works (Waldron, 2012). In both cases, these videos

do not consider the overall aspects of the musical ed-

ucation but rather psycho-motor domain and in part

the musical knowledge. For example, the most pop-

ular commercially-driven tool dedicated to learning

musical instruments is Yousician (Yousician, 2019);

it currently supports the guitar, piano, ukulele, bass,

and voice learning. Users are displayed either a gam-

iﬁed, colorful version of sheet music or tablature no-

tation for an exercise and hear a backing track as they

play along. A major criticism depends on its nature:

being this tool commercially-driven and designed for

several instruments, the learning approach of Yousi-

cian is only based on the imitative process (i.e., the

tablature ﬂows and the rhythm are punctuated as in a

Karaoke style). These characteristics support a skill

acquisition but do not guarantee the acquisition of the

audiation (to the best of our knowledge, no studies

about Yousician have been reported on that).

What it is clear is that when the musical learning

tools are not commercially-driven, there are “...lim-

ited effects, although research shows positive impact

of this kind of technology” (Konecki, 2014). This au-

thor proposes to include adaptive learning paradigms

and real-time tracking of one’s playing patterns and

he focuses on the use of the artiﬁcial intelligence so-

lutions to improve the quality of the learning musi-

cal instruments. The most recent literature also fo-

cuses on the collaborative aspects in learning music,

in general, and a musical instrument, in particular (see

e.g., (Schoonderwaldt et al., 2004) and (Burns et al.,

2017)), since cultural and social aspects are chang-

ing (Finney and Burnard, 2010) (Ferrari et al., 2006)

(Pitts and Kwami, 2002). Moreover, in order to keep

the interest of students for playing music, new tech-

nologies must incorporate certain concepts that ap-

pear in computer games (Denis and Jouvelot, 2005)

(C. Klimmt, 2003) (Koster, 2013); since these com-

puter programs can improve skill acquisition and can

boost students’ motivation, these computer systems

are becoming more relevant and interesting for use in

musical instruments playing education. It is out of

the scope of this paper arguing about how the game

concept is involved in ICT-learning projects, it is in-

stead crucial to deﬁne the concept of gamiﬁcation as

the use of game elements in non-game contexts, since

it is largely used in the CrazySquare project. The use

of gamiﬁcation in education is stated as the successful

integration of the course contents to increase the stu-

dents’ motivation, performance, and attitudes toward

the course. (Nah et al., 2014) reviewed the literature

on gamiﬁcation and found the following design ele-

ments for gamiﬁcation, such as (1) prizes, rewards,

points, badges, levels, leaderboards; (2) immediate

feedback, progress bars; (3) peer interaction and col-

laboration; (4) storytelling; (5) avatar, character up-

grades, customization, unlockable content.

CrazySquare goes in this direction, applying the

gamiﬁcation elements for the acquisition of audiation,

necessary to playing a guitar consciously, guarantee-

ing a longer learning follow-up. Moreover, similar to

Yousician, also CrazySquare analyses the users’ play-

ing on their guitar, and provides them with instant

feedback and guidance (exploiting the pitch recogni-

tion techniques) since from its ﬁrst prototype (Pen-

nese et al., 2013). Differently from Yousician the

current prototype follows the iterative TEL-oriented

UCD approach (Di Mascio et al., 2016), supports the

audiation and it is designed to guarantee music and

musical instruments learning at the same time, also if

the user (young teen from 10 to 13 years old) is ap-

proaching at the musical education for the ﬁrst time.

The paper is structured as follows: the ped-

agogical underpinnings were presented in Section

2, while in Section 3, the theory underpinning the

CrazySquare project is outlined and speciﬁed; in Sec-

tion 4 the gamiﬁcation aspects are reported and some

implementation aspects highlighted, while in Sec-

tion 5, a preliminary evaluation from domain experts,

conclusions and future works are described.

2 PEDAGOGICAL ASPECTS

As mentioned in Section 1, in the Italian schools, mu-

sical education is organized according to the musical

education skills of (D.M. n.201, 1999): melody, har-

mony, rhythm, timbre, dynamic, and agogic and there

is the list of associated musical instrumental skills

(e.g., ability of correlate sign-gesture-sound or im-

provising music ability). These skills are chosen ac-

cording to the more recent literature in musical educa-

tional, see (Willems, 1946), (Jaques-Dalcroze, 1921),

(Shamrock, 1986), and (Kod

aly, 1952). In fact, Edgar

Willems,

Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, Zolt

Kod

aly agree on the fact that the musical education

imply the internalization of sounds and the learning of

Gamify the Audiation: The CrazySquare Project

Figure 1: Types of Audiation versus (D.M. n.201, 1999) skills.

a musical instruments is not really achieved if sounds

are not internalized. This concept has been clari-

ﬁed and formalized by Edwin Gordon. Edwin Gor-

don’s Music Learning Theory (Gordon, 2007) pro-

vides music teachers with a comprehensive frame-

work for teaching musicianship through audiation,

Gordon’s term for hearing music in the mind with

understanding and comprehension when the sound is

not physically present. The sequence of instructions

is discrimination learning and inference learning: the

former is the ability to determine whether two ele-

ments are the same or not the same using aural/oral,

verbal association, partial synthesis, symbolic asso-

ciation, and composite synthesis; the latter students

take an active role in their own education and learn

to identify, create, and improvise unfamiliar patterns.

The skills and content sequences within the Audia-

tion Theory (Gordon, 2019), composed of eight Types

(e.g.,“reading”, “writing”) suggested us to establish a

learner model necessary to design an adaptive learn-

ing system dedicated to the guitar learning. The

learner model is based on the mapping between the

Gordon’s Types and the (D.M. n.201, 1999) skills, as

shown in Table of Figure 1. Section 3 is the result of

this research activity.

3 THE CrazySquare PROJECT

CrazySquare was born for Italian young teenagers

(10 - 13 years old) attending primary and middle

schools, who approaching music and a musical in-

strument (i.e., the guitar) for the ﬁrst time; the con-

texts in which learners could interact with are: the

classroom, as a support during the teaching activities,

and the home, as a support of homework activities.

The CrazySquare is designed as an Advanced Learn-

ing System (ALS) following a TEL-oriented UCD ap-

proach (Di Mascio et al., 2016). This methodology

expands the traditional iterative user-centered design

approach in order to emphasize the necessity of de-

signing in parallel both a psycho-pedagogical stimu-

lation plan and the system modules realizing it in a

context of mutual dependency, along with the choice

of a psycho-pedagogical assessment strategy.

Figure 2: The TEL-oriented UCD schema.

The current stage of the project is the prototyping so-

lution deployment at the second iteration. The ﬁrst

iteration produced the ﬁrst prototype detailed in (Pen-

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

nese et al., 2013) and mainly focused on the merging

aspects between the study of rhythm and its represen-

tation with the technique on the musical instrument.

The second prototype mainly focus on the audiation

aspects according to the designed stimulation plan,

explained in Section 3.1. Gamiﬁcation aspects are

present in both prototypes as explained in Section 4.

3.1 The Stimulation Plan

As to the teaching/learning, based on the Gordon’s

approach (Gordon, 2003), CrazySquare is grounded

on gamiﬁcation ideas of learning through gaming,

training via iterations, and of rewarding structures

for pushing students’ learning forward. Each learn-

ing experience can be divided in three phases, refer-

ring to a customary warm-up, peak and relax work-

load (Di Mascio et al., 2013):

• Teaching Phase - warm-up, which currently takes

place in the classroom with the musical instru-

ment teacher; during this lesson the teacher will

introduce the concepts that will be trained during

the execution of the exercises foreseen by the as-

sessment phase.

• Assessment Phase - peak, which currently takes

place via CrazySquare and consists of a series of

“play and enjoy” learning experiences performed

with an instrument (voice/hand or guitar), with the

help of two of the following types of metronome:

– Acoustic metronome;

– Visual metronome;

– Harmonic metronome;

– Musical accompaniment;

– Metronome off.

• Relaxing Phase - relax, which currently takes

place via CrazySquare and consists of playing

with relaxing games, which aims to lower the cog-

nitive load and to engage the player.

These learning experiences (two or three per week)

have to be run in private having own individual in-

teraction with the system, for a max of 30 minutes.

As to the stimulation plan, it is grounded on one ba-

sic principle: progresses are to be assessed during the

assessment phase, by associating hearing and playing

within playing sessions. Coherently with the learn-

ing theory, also these sessions referring to warm-up -

peak - relax workload: during the warm-up and peak

phases, young teens play with learning games (before

more easy then more complex) gaining points, while,

during the relax phase, young teens play with relax-

ing games; points and games are designed as tangible

rewards.

Learning is obtained achieving 4 main skills (from

now denoted as A, B, C and D) reported in the second

row of the Figure 5. These skills, each of them posi-

tioned under its own Audition Type, are described as

follows:

• A: Perceive and maintain the pulsation for prede-

ﬁned beats per minute (bpm) value;

• B: Recognize and execute by reading a sequence

of rhythmic symbols;

• C: Play with the instrument musical notes, articu-

lating them through reading of rhythmic symbols;

• D: Execute change chords at different speeds.

A, B, C and D are achieved by acquiring increas-

ing competences (the complete list is reported in the

ﬁfth row of Figure 5), obtained considering two lev-

els of difﬁculties (base and advanced) of the corre-

sponding skill object (in the third row). For example

the skill C is obtained acquiring the competences A

, B

, C

and C

3.2 Realizing the Stimulation Plan

From an interaction point of view a competence has

to be viewed as a Matrix organized in blocks: the

competence A

is achieved playing with a minimum

of 2 blocks to the maximum of 4 blocks (see Fig-

ure 3), following the state diagram in Figure 4, in

which movements are unlocked by gaining one, two

or three points (or stars). Each competence has its

own associated block matrix (see the seventh row of

Figure 5). In CrazySquare we designed 4 types of

blocks as clear observing, for example, the compe-

tence A

, that is composed of the all 4 block types.

Each block is composed of learning exercises

from now denoted as Ex (min 4 Ex, max 6 Ex) plus

only 1 relaxing games accessible after gaining a suf-

ﬁcient number of stars. The interaction with a block

always starts with a learning exercises and ends with a

relaxing games according to the mentioned cognitive

workload. the 4 blocks differ from each other accord-

ing to different visit ﬂows of exercises.

Generally, each competence K

(representing the Matrix), with K ∈

}, can be

identiﬁed by a set of mX n different Ex, where m

is the number of Matrix rows and n is the number

of columns. Then an Ex

i j

, is characterized by an

User Input Type y ∈ {Hands/Voice,Guitar} and

by a System Sound Type z ∈ {acoustic metronome,

visual metronome, harmonic metronome, musical

accompaniment, metronome off }. In general, we can

deﬁne a learning exercise Ex of the competence K as:

|(y, z)

Gamify the Audiation: The CrazySquare Project

Figure 3: The structure of A

competence shown as block

matrix.

Figure 4: The state diagram of the competence A

For example, the competence A

is composed by

20 exercises, performed as a linear sequence accord-

ing to the ﬂow of the corresponding block type.

At the end of each Ex, the young teen gain stars as

reward, that we indicate with s ∈ {1,2,3}, according

to its performance. At the end of every block, after a

relaxing game, according to the total number of stars

won in every exercises, indicated with S

total

, the sys-

tem gives the user the possibility to continue along the

learning ﬂow appropriately, according to a predeﬁned

state diagram, see for example Figure 4 representing

the state diagram of the competence A

4 GAMIFY THE AUDIATION

In this section we aim at highlighting the gamiﬁcation

elements used and introduced in the two prototypes of

the CrazySquare system. In order to to that, we report

here some system speciﬁcation.

4.1 The System Speciﬁcation

The ﬁrst version of the game aimed to be playable

on different devices, i.e. PC running different OSs

and Android devices. The prototype was mainly im-

plemented using Processing software, a Java pro-

gramming environment which already provides au-

dio libraries for signal processing, such as Ess, Sonia,

Beads, Minim, with a fair number of features (i.e. Au-

dioSources, ForwardFFT, etc.), as well as libraries for

signal synthesis and composition such as SoundCi-

pher, and Tactus5 (Pennese et al., 2013). In particular

the library Minim has been chosen for signal process-

ing purposes. Moreover, for sound synthesis, the use

of SoundCipher was exploited. For the very ﬁrst dig-

ital prototype these choices seemed to be the best so-

lution since they guaranteed real time response and

easiness of understanding for future improvements.

The current prototype of CrazySquare has been

developed only for mobile devices (i.e. tablets and

smartphones) with Android OS. It was mainly im-

plemented using Android Studio 3.2, the ofﬁcial in-

tegrated development environment for Google’s An-

droid operating system, built on JetBrains’ IntelliJ

IDEA software and designed speciﬁcally for Android

development. It’s also used the Kotlin programming

language, a modern language based on JVM (Java

Virtual Machine), introduced in Android Studio from

version 3.0. Currently, instead of using libraries pro-

vided by Processing software, we had chosen Tarsos-

DSP library, a Java music library which proved to be

the most complete and suitable for the objectives of

our project.

4.2 Gamiﬁcation in the 1st Prototype

The gamiﬁcation aspects have already been intro-

duced in the ﬁrst prototype, since it focused on the

speciﬁcation of psycho-pedagogical strategy, i.e., the

homonym paper and pencil game: a square with 16

boxes, each one graphically representing the impulse

(i.e., a snap made by the teacher). A young teen

aimed to overcome some different levels of difﬁcul-

ties in terms of the understanding and the execution of

rhythmic symbols and melodic sequences. The gami-

ﬁcation element of immediate feedback has been re-

alized via pitch detection of a note; it is approached

with the introduction and the use of an instrument:

playing a particular and instructed note (or more than

one for a harmonic instrument) within the constraints

of rhythmic symbols in the boxes represented. The

number of different notes induced the difﬁculty of lev-

els, i.e., a second gamiﬁcation element. Notes can be

associated with colors, so the young teen can com-

pose a little melody in a row, declaring and assigning

himself a task, for which the game will just control

the right execution. After the complexion of a certain

number of levels the ﬁrst prototype of CrazySquare

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Figure 5: Gamify the audiation.

offered riddles: a rhythmic pattern is played, and the

player have to put the right box in the right position in-

side the crazy square. The evaluation of the ﬁrst pro-

totype of CrazySquare highlighted issues about pitch

detection algorithms, solved in (Rinaldi et al., 2015)

and skill-based classiﬁcation (the learner model) on

which the psycho-pedagogical stimulation has to be

based.

4.3 Gamiﬁcation in the 2nd Prototype

Similarly to the ﬁrst, the current prototype has seen a

signiﬁcant improvement and the introduction of gam-

iﬁcation elements, according to (Nah et al., 2014).

Currently, as described in detail previously, the game-

system provides different learning games. The gami-

ﬁcation element of immediate feedback is provided

inside every exercise, because the game-system no-

tify immediately, with colors and with assignation of

points, if the player has done the activity correctly or

no. In every exercise, according to points obtained

by the player, the system provides to assign an appro-

priate reward, i.e. from 1 to 3 stars. Furthermore,

inside each matrix, there are some unlockable con-

tents, represented by blocks, which are unlockable

only if the player obtains a certain number of stars

at the end of each Base Level.

For example, for the competence A

there are the

following exercises:

• Ex

1-j

| (Hands/Voice, Acoustic metronome): By

listening to the metronome, perceiving and

keeping isochronous pulse, indicated by j ∈

{70bpm, 75bpm,65bpm,80bpm,55bpm}, clap-

ping the hands or with the voice;

• Ex

2-j

| (Hands/Voice, metronome off): With-

out listening to the metronome, perceiving and

keeping isochronous pulse, indicating by j ∈

{70bpm, 75bpm,65bpm,80bpm,55bpm}, clap-

ping the hands or with the voice;

• Ex

3-j

| (guitar, acoustic metronome): By lis-

tening to the metronome, perceiving and

keeping isochronous pulse, indicated by

j ∈ {70bpm,75bpm,65bpm,80bpm, 55bpm},

with the guitar, pitching a string.

• Ex

4-j

| (guitar, metronome off): Without lis-

tening to the metronome, perceiving and

keeping isochronous pulse, indicated by

j ∈ {70bpm,75bpm,65bpm,80bpm, 55bpm},

with the guitar, pitching a string.

Each exercise is composed by two steps and it starts

with 4 alignment beats: this ﬁrst step is meant to help

the player to synchronize with the bpm provided for

that exercise. After this step, 20 beats have to be ex-

ecuted by the player at the bpm provided for that ex-

ercise. Stars, indicated by s, will be assigned in the

following way, according to the performance of the

player:

• s = 1 if the player executes properly at most 10

beats;

Gamify the Audiation: The CrazySquare Project

Figure 6: Some screens of the current prototype of CrazySquare.

• s = 2 if the player executes properly a number of

beats between 11 and 15;

• s = 3 if the player executes properly at least 16

beats.

Relaxing games planned for this competence consist

of watching two different videos of people playing

music, belonging to different genres and/or epochs,

and choosing which one of the two has the fastest or

slowest rhythm. Figure 6(c) represents the relaxing

game appears after the learning exercises of the com-

petence A

: it consists in showing two videos with-

out the sounds support and in asking to the young teen

to tap the video having the high bpm.

4.4 The CrazySquare GUI

At now, if a student wants to play with CrazySquare,

he/she must have a personal account, reason for which

the system provides the possibility of sign-in or sign-

up into CrazySquare in an easy way. The system, as

you can see in the Figure 6(a) and in the Figure 6(b),

provides a way to sign-in or to sign-up and a smooth

way to retrieve the forgotten nickname or password,

according to the guidelines generally suggested by

mobile design patterns. If the user does not have a

personal account, the system provides a way to cre-

ate one, characterized by a two-step procedure: the

ﬁrst dedicated to the user, the second dedicated to par-

ents. Indeed, CrazySquare is an application which is

used by teens aged between 10 and 13 years, conse-

quently we must take into account that they are mi-

nors: from the article 8 of General Data Protection

Regulation (GDPR 2018 - art. 8: ”Conditions appli-

cable to child’s consent in relation to information so-

ciety services”) it is evident that there are some limi-

tations determined by existing legislation in term of

privacy and processing of personal data in applica-

tions which provide services of the information so-

ciety (such as mobile applications). Consequently, it

is necessary to have an explicit consent from the per-

son exercising the parental authority of the underage

user who uses the application.

All displays of the application are characterized

by a consistent graphic, distinguished by an align-

ment and a central symmetry of graphics elements,

and buttons, as well as being tap-friendly, assume

an almost invariant position among the various dis-

plays (Di Mascio et al., 2004). The Nielsen Nor-

man Group also discovered that young teens also have

unique usability problems-not surprisingly as they en-

countered difﬁculty reading large chunks of text, es-

pecially when the text was written above their read-

ing level (Budiu and Nielsen, 2014): for this rea-

son CrazySquare has adopted a language that is clear,

simple and close to teen slang. Furthermore, we

chose a standard color palette characterized by very

bright and lively colors, in accordance with the typical

preferences of young teens, and three more palettes,

which are won as rewards, in order to give to the users

the chance to personalize their game interface.

5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORKS

In this paper, we presented and discussed the sec-

ond prototyping solution of CrazySquare, which is

a valid high level of musical education support for

teachers who want to involve their students in learn-

ing guitar in a professional way. This game-system

has been inspired by the Gordon’s Theory (Gordon,

2003), which hypothesizes that musical learning is

CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

based on the audiation. The application of the con-

cept of gamiﬁcation in our project is a key point,

as its elements (described by (Nah et al., 2014))

have a proved positive impact on learners, increas-

ing their motivation, performance and attitudes to-

ward the course. As we have already explained in

Section 3, the CrazySquare project follows a TEL-

oriented UCD schema and, moreover, in every step of

this design approach we have collaborated with do-

main experts, who expressed positive impression and

that validated, thanks to their experience, the psycho-

pedagogical solution obtained after the 2

◦

step of the

◦

cycle of iteration. Consequently, in the next fu-

ture, we have planned to evaluate the current proto-

type with end users. Moreover, further testing on the

validity of the proposed psycho-pedagogical method-

ology is going to be carried on. The results, that will

emerge from this evaluation phase, will allow us to

proceed with a more reﬁned cycle of iteration of the

TEL-oriented UCD.

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