Observing Pianist Accuracy and Form with Computer Vision

Abstract

We present a first step towards developing an interactive piano tutoring system that can observe a student playing the piano and give feedback about hand movements and musical accuracy. In particular, we have two primary aims: 1) to determine which notes on a piano are being played at any moment in time, 2) to identify which finger is pressing each note. We introduce a novel two-stream convolutional neural network that takes video and audio inputs together for detecting pressed notes and finger presses. We formulate our two problems in terms of multi-task learning and extend a state-of-the-art object detection model to incorporate both audio and visual features. In addition, we introduce a novel finger identification solution based on pressed piano note information. We experimentally confirm that our approach is able to detect pressed piano keys and the piano player's fingers with a high accuracy.