Tactile Presentation of Orchestral Conductor's Motion Trajectory

Visually impaired people experience difficulties participating in orchestral or other musical performances because they cannot see the temporal instructions presented by the conductor using hand and baton movements. In this study, as an early validation of the concept's feasibility, we propose an approach to present conductor's movements to the target musicians using an array of vibro-tactile actuators. Specifically we utilize tactile apparent movement to convey the conductor's motion to visually impaired people. We conducted comparative experiments using the response time between the correct beat timing and the predicted beat timing as the accuracy measure to evaluate the proposed system. The results show that in situations such as when the tempo of music or starting time of the performance changes, the proposed method significantly outperformed existing solutions.