Tactile Teacher: Toward Sensing Taps When Playing Piano

In a piano lesson, a student often imitates how her teacher is playing in terms of speed, dynamics, and fingering. We seek to convey the touch sensations in piano lessons between a teacher and a student by sensing the teacher's keystrokes and then tapping the student's fingers appropriately. Here, we propose an implementation to sense finger taps on hard surfaces by using an instrumented glove. Since finger taps generate acoustic signals and cause vibrations on the palm, we embed two vibration sensors on the glove and use machine learning to analyze the data from the sensors. After a brief training procedure, this prototype can accurately identify which fingers are being tapped in real time. Author