Online Activities for Music Information and Acoustics Education and Psychoacoustic Data Collection

Online collaborative activities provide a powerful platform for the collection of psychoacoustic data on the perception of audio and music from a very large numbers of subjects. Furthermore, these activities can be designed to simultaneously educate users about aspects of music information and acoustics, particularly for younger students in grades K-12. We have created prototype interactive activities illustrating aspects of two different sound and acoustics concepts: musical instrument timbre and the cocktail party problem (sound source isolation within mixtures) that also provide a method of collecting perceptual data related to these problems with a range of parameter variation that is difficult to achieve for large subject populations using traditional psychoacoustic evaluation. We present preliminary data from a pilot study where middle school students were engaged with the two activities to demonstrate the potential benefits as an education and data collection platform.