Gamified E-Learning Technology for Live Musicians: Application Design and Performance Evaluation Criteria for Keyboarders

Assessing a player’s performance is an essential part of gamified applications or serious games. For keyboard practice in the musical domain, an established approach is comparing played keys and a fixed MIDI score. However, concerning the evaluation of live performances (the actual keyboard playing and not to confuse with the stage public performance) within gamified technologies, only little is known. In this work, we investigate evaluating the live and improvised performance of keyboarders within a gamified E-Learning app. We introduce three performance criteria based on underlying musical concepts, again each composed of three sub-criteria, and provide abstract definitions for them whose implementation in a software system depends on application-specific parameters (e.g., keyboard hardware, sound generation software, and chord progression). Based on the results of an expert user study, we conclude
that our performance criteria correctness and playing style are well generalizable and could offer meaningful insight into the abilities of live keyboard performance, whereas the sound usage criterion was perceived as diverse, depending on our participants’ genre-expertise.