Teaching Children Musical Perception with MUSIC-AR

Abstract

Unfortunately in Brazil there is a non compulsory musical education in schools that leads to loss of sound/musical perception of Brazilian children. This fact, associated with the lack of software for the teaching of musical perception, inspired the creation of Music-AR, a set of software that uses Augmented Reality technology for the teaching of sound properties, such as timbre, pitch and sound intensity. There were four small applications for that: the first one allows the child to manipulate virtual objects linked to sounds, this way, the child can loosen and stretch virtual objects relating them to the (bass and treble) sound pitch; the second focus on the concept of sound intensity, associating it to virtual animals been far or near to the children; the third is related to duration of the sound (short or long), and the last is about timbre – the personality of the sound. Tests were applied and the results are presented in this work.