Mobile Music Touch: The effect of primary tasks on passively learning piano sequences

The Mobile Music Touch (MMT) system allows users to learn to reproduce piano note sequences while performing other tasks. The system consists of a mobile Bluetooth-enabled computing device and a fingerless glove with embedded vibrators corresponding to each finger and thumb. Melodies to be learned are played over the user's headphones repeatedly. As each note is played, the finger corresponding to the appropriate piano key is stimulated. Past experiments have shown that users could learn simple note sequences even though they were performing a reading comprehension test. Here, we investigate different primary tasks to determine which, if any, interfere with the Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) effect. In a 12 participant within-subject user study, no overall difference was observed in the number of passive sessions required to learn a random note sequence when users viewed a film, played a memory game, or followed a walking path as their primary task. However, individual differences in scores suggest that the type of primary task may have a greater or lesser effect for a given user.