Towards a Personalized Technical Ear Training Program: an Investigation of the Effect of Adaptive Feedback

Technical ear training aims to improve the listening of sound engineers so that they can skillfully modify and edit the structure of sound. To provide non-professionals such as amateur sound engineers and students with this technical ear training, we have developed a simple yet personalized ear training program. The most distinct feature of this system is that it adaptively controls the training task based on the trainee’s previous performance. In detail, this system estimates a trainee’s weakness, and generates a training routine that provides drills focusing on the weakness, so that the trainee can effectively receive technical ear training without an instructor. We subsequently investigated the effect of the new training program with a one-month training experiment involving eight subjects. The result showed that the score of the group assigned to the proposed training system improved more than that of the group assigned to conventional training.