by Shane Cox, Ingrid Henderson, and Diana Tosca
What is BlockMuse?
Learning music can be difficult. Musical notation is abstract, and while a trained musician can easily distinguish between quarter notes and half notes, it isn't always so easy for children learning about the different shapes. BlockMuse is a tangible user interface designed to give physical form to these abstract concepts. By providing physical blocks of the different notes and rests, BlockMuse lets children learn about music by exploring what happens when differently shaped and colored blocks are placed on a musical staff. Lights below the staff light up according to how many half beats a note gets. This means placing an eighth note on the screen results in one light changing to yellow. When all the beats in a measure are filled, the lights turn green. If a user attempts to put a note that has more beats than the measure has left (e.g. a whole note in a measure that already has a quarter note) BlockMuse makes a friendly error noise to alert the user that the note won't fit. When the user has filled up the measure, they can play a chord of the notes on the staff by placing a play button on the designated area.
Outside of children's toys, there have been few tangible user interfaces (TUIs) designed to help children learn about toys. BlockMuse is innovative as it combines learning music with a TUI to capitalize on our natural abilities to handle objects and learn by doing.
Initial Design Sketch
Our initial design included using a physical board similar to those found in board games such as Operation™. From the beginning, we wanted physical objects for users to interact with.
Second Iteration
For our second iteration, we switched to a Multitaction screen and began using Cornerstone SDK to implement BlockMuse. We laser cut wood into different note shapes and painted the blocks so that notes that are red take up four-full beats, blue two, yellow one, and purple half of a beat. In other words, red blocks are whole notes, blue are half notes, yellow are quarter notes, and purple are 1/8th notes. We decided to make the staff 4/4 time, which is the time signature used for most beginner music. At the end of the second milestone, we were able to use Cornerstone's Resonant class to play each note for its duration when a block was placed on the staff.
Current Product
The current iteration of BlockMuse plays the full length of each type of block when it is placed on the screen. The note is determined by where it is placed on the staff. For instance, a C note is played when put in the bar which corresponds to C on a musical staff. When a rest block is played, the sound of a ticking metronome is played to alert the user of the beat that is happening. The blocks are a combination of painted wood, paper, and black-on-white acrylic. RFID tags were laser cut into the acrylic and are read by the Multitaction to identify which note was placed on the screen.
What's Next?
In the next iteration, BlockMuse could be improved by playing back the notes in the order which they are arranged on screen. This would allow users to see how the different notes sound when played back, rather than only once when the note is placed. An undo button would allow users to retract a note they have placed, rather than having to reset the entire board. It would also benefit from gaining the ability to place more than one of each type of note on the screen, so that the user can have two eighth notes, for instance.
About Us
BlockMuse is a tangible interface designed by the innovative minds of Shane Cox, Ingrid Henderson, and Diana Tosca. Created to help children learn about music, BlockMuse uses color-coded tangible blocks to turn music into a three dimensional interactive experience. Our goal is to make learning music fun and intuitive by making it more hands-on in the classroom, instead of a strictly memorization-based exercise.
Created for Wellesley College's Fall '17 Course
CS 320: Tangible User Interfaces