Effects of multi-modal guidance for the acquisition of sight reading skills: A case study with simple drum sequences

We introduce a learning system for the sight reading skill of simple drum sequences. Sight reading is a cognitive-motor skill that requires reading of music symbols and actions of multiple limbs for playing the music. The system provides knowledge of results (KR) pertaining to the learner´s performance by color-coding music symbols, and guides the learner by indicating the corresponding action for a given music symbol using additional auditory or vibrotactile cues. To evaluate the effects of KR and guidance cues, three learning methods were experimentally compared: KR only, KR with auditory cues, and KR with vibrotactile cues. The task was to play random 16-note-long drum sequence displayed on a screen. Thirty university students learned the task using one of the learning methods in a between-subjects design. The experimental results did not show statistically significant differences between the methods in terms of task accuracy and completion time. This suggests that KR can be dominant for learning the task and the role of guidance cues can be subsidiary.