Learning musical instruments is challenging. Musicians, whether those at the beginning of their journey or experienced practitioners, must balance the need to learn a great deal of technique and repertoire with limitations in their time, physical and mental endurance, and ability to communicate a complex and abstract set of thoughts and movements. This results in the high rates of stress, frustration, burnout, and injury seen among musicians at all levels, and can deter young musicians from taking up or continuing with their studies.

The TELMI project is addressing these challenges by developing a suite of technology to enhance musical learning. Using the violin as a case study, the Royal College of Music is developing a pedagogical framework for the system that embraces both traditional methods of violin instruction and modern cognitive research on how people gain expertise and learn skills efficiently and effectively. At the heart of the system are the groundbreaking advancements in audio, video, and motion-capture systems being developed by the project partners at Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Genoa. Highskillz is bringing its expertise in digital learning platforms and gamification to develop an intuitive user interface that can both guide and motivate a beginner and provide high-level feedback to an expert, all while incorporating a social learning system that helps musicians learn from their peers. SAICO Intelligence will guide the resulting system to the market, ensuring it reaches as many potential users as possible.

Over three years (2016-19), TELMI will result in a unified system that can be tailored to a wide range of musicians, experience levels, and learning situations. It will help musicians make the most of their time in lessons and practice, reduce injury and inefficiency, expand their access to communities of musical knowledge, and become better performers.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688269

The general objectives of the TELMI project are:

1. to design and implement new interaction paradigms for music learning and training based on state-of-the-art multi-modal (audio, image, video, and motion) technologies,

2. to evaluate the pedagogical effectiveness of such new paradigms,

3. to develop new multi-modal, interactive music learning prototypes for student-teacher, student only, and collaborative learning scenarios,

4. to create a publicly available reference database of multimodal recordings for online learning and social interaction among students.

The results of the project will serve as a basis for the development of next generation music learning systems, thereby improving on current student-teacher interaction and student-only practice, providing the potential to make music education and its benefits accessible to a substantially wider public.