Introducing the Interpretation Switcher Interface to Music Education

In the field of music information retrieval (MIR), great efforts have been directed towards the development of technologies and interfaces that allow users to access and explore music on an unprecedented scale. On the other hand, musicians and music teachers are often still skeptical about the benefits of computer-based methods in music education. In this paper, we report on an experiment conducted at the University of Music Saarbrücken with the goal to introduce a novel MIR user interface, referred to as Interpretation Switcher, to music education and to get feedback from music experts. To this end, we asked nine music students to analyze different performances of the same piece of music according to a well designed questionnaire, using the novel switching functionality of our interface. Doing so, we not only tested and evaluated our interface in a setting of practical relevance, but also indicated the potential of MIR methods in music education.