JumpApp: an online didactic game for music training and education

Musical learning is beneficial for individual of all ages. In particular, the use of interactive software tools is considered nowadays essential for increased engagement, experience personalisation, and effectiveness. This is particularly true for the task of music education, which has to face the problem of complex rules and notation. For these reasons, we developed JumpApp, a musical didactic game. The devised software is a completely web-based application built on JavaScript and accessible through Chrome browser. The objectives of JumpApp are twofold. First, the user is trained to improve the relative pitch with an engaging listening experience. Secondly, such a learning is decoupled from the standard western music notation, through a user-friendly interface that maps notes in an octave in an innovative way, thus avoiding the learning of complex theoretical rules and musical notation of intervals and scales. The quality of experience, versatility and learning effectiveness of JumpApp, have been evaluated by musicians with different music background through a questionnaire. The paper is structured in a top-down fashion. We start from a description of the features of JumpApp. We then discuss how these features have been implemented in the software and the signal processing blocks that attain the goal. Finally, results of the evaluation process are reported along with final considerations and future works.