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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

My kids have been having their music lessons (cello & viola) remotely since the quarantine. For the advanced student, I can see 50% of lessons workable as remote, but not more than that. My kid may switch to every other lesson remote (two lessons per week at 45 minutes each).

For the beginner, it doesn’t work that well, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

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But we need to figure out why the initial lessons are better in person than remote. It could be that small changes are needed in camera placement, or screens or something we haven't thought of.

For many instruments you outline, it is how the bow or the instrument is held, this might be better online with the right tools, esp if you had multicamera pose estimation, it might not even need a teacher the majority of the time.

Or, it might listen to the student and tell them they should rest or contact the teacher for some realtime feedback.

Are instruction times the length they are because of other issues? Should they be longer or shorter? Can a single teacher oversee multiple students at the same time? Does it _need_ to be 1:1 for the whole session?

Have you ever tried to teach someone something physical before?

Maybe in the best case scenario you could have a multi-camera 4k, low latency setup. But how many students have the means and space to configure that?

For everyone else, the teacher loses the spontaneity to inspect subtle differences from various angles and what not. As a piano teacher you want to be able to flit between left/right hand, face, feet, shoulders, elbows, posture.

Maybe you could cover a lot of that with two very well positioned cameras on hands and body but that's really no substitute for the teacher being able to walk around observing the student. Let alone switching places and inviting the student to observe in a similar fashion.

I'm sure there are opportunities for remote teaching of instruments to actually do certain things better than in person (by taking advantage of technology) but there will never be a true substitute for in person teaching - telecommunication is simply too lossy

You're proposing essentially that the vast amount of skill that teachers have (as educators) can now be replaced by robots.

That wasn't the case before coronavirus and won't be the case afterwards.

The best robot teacher that exists is Duolingo, and I don't know a single person who has learned a language to a conversational level that way.

Language and music aren't the same; arguably, the part of the class that involves learning how to hold an instrument correctly could be replaced by technology.

As for why this wasn't the case before coronavirus: there was no reason to. There wasn't good enough of a market. Now, there is, so perhaps some ideas from this situation will stick around for longer.

(Then again, I've heard numerous reports that in general, remote school classes are a huge dumpster fire. I don't expect any of that staying when the schools are allowed to reopen. But maybe the postmortems will bring some nuggets of insight about effective remote schooling.)

As the parent of a violinist and a violist, I find the role of the teacher for aspects like holding the instrument, to be less like "teaching" and much more like "debugging".

Kids grow, and every person's body is different: even when they've been playing for 10+ years and have reached the most advanced levels, they're still asking their teachers and fellow musicians to "debug" posture - because subtle changes can have outsize impact. This is why master classes exist, for instance.

There are all kinds of tools in this debugging toolkit. Some of them are rather tactile, such as feeling how much force is being transferred from the hand to the tip of the bow, feeling how "soft" the bow-hand is being held, feeling how much the bow arm's elbow is being allowed to sink under its own weight, or how much the shoulder is being tensed - because muscle tension can be a huge issue for string players. Not to mention the huge number of minute adjustments that can be made to various angles and might involve tweaks to shoulder rests, chin rests and so on.

Right now teachers have to debug, without being able to use their hands. A tall order for anyone. Just imagine being asked to debug software without being able to use your hands, or to poke at the system: no attaching a debugger, no inserting print statements - all you can do is give verbal inputs and observe outputs. It's a huge responsibility, when failing to debug, or getting it wrong, can have serious consequences (life-long problems with pain, for example).

Some teachers are much better than others at such "debugging", so yes from that perspective it sure would be nifty to invent some technology that guarantees more consistent results. But is it realistic? Every body is different physically, and the human touch and expertise plays a major role.

So, I can't help but think it would actually be a simpler problem to create an AI that can reliably debug software, vs creating AI that can reliably debug a musician's physical relationship to their instrument.

Fair enough. I should've thought about complexities of handling instruments more. My mind just raced to the memories of my piano lessons and the time a friend was teaching me guitar; the part about correct hold/finger placement were essentially pattern-matching, the kind I could see software solving right now (enough cameras + right software). But I understand now that what I've been taught was just the beginning of the beginning.

As for debugging in general, I agree and offer an analogy that might be intimately familiar to everyone here: debugging your parent's/neighbour's/friend's computer over the phone. I can handle it for about two minutes before my head hurts and I start boiling from anger. These days, I flat out refuse helping this way; if it can't wait, I only explain them how to install TeamViewer and what numbers to spell me over the phone.

I would thing a large portion of it is actually sound. The microphone in a laptop is just not very good, and then even if the instructor has expensive studio monitors its going to get super compressed. On top of the bad acoustics in whatever random room they are in, and background noise.

And while a multi camera setup would certainly be awesome, and help with positioning of hands and instrument, its just not really a practical setup for the majority of people. Now you need a great microphone, multiple cameras, probably tripods or something for camera positioning. An in person class solves all those problems.

45 minutes seems to be the standard for most classes, and I believe the research is as classes go longer than that they become less effective for learning. And sure you can do group classes, that happens in band class, but the student does not get as much attention and depending on the learning style and student that may just not be enough.

The aggressive sound processing (mainly echo cancellation and noise reduction) doesn't help either. Works great for speach legibility, not so well for music.

The person receiving early music lessons is often a very young child (4 or 5 years old). Good freakin' luck getting them to follow precise, careful instructions from a Zoom instructor.

I've taken dance lessons. They'd never work remotely. A large part of it is because what you think you're doing with your body is not what you're actually doing.

Sometimes the instructor has to use his hands to push you into the right position. Another large part is both of you stand in front of a floor to ceiling mirror. He'll be in front of you off to one side, so you can see both him in real life and your reflection at the same time. He moves, and you match, looking at both him and your reflection.

Lastly, you'll never learn a partner dance online, because it's all about the feel of working with a partner.

Dance lessons in a group setting work well. My dance classes have made the transition to online lessons. Zoom can get laggy sometimes so tap doesn't work well in real-time. I've improved my tap tremendously from the amount of practice and the ability to replay tutorial videos.

I have my laptop placed such that the webcam acts as a mirror and the tutorial video or Zoom meeting of the class on my second screen. When the teachers shows positions that are obfuscated they turns to face the camera in a 45 degree angle. The only 360 view missing is the Chinese whispers / follow the leader view of seeing the other dancers in the class is when my eyeline is out of view.

How about the teacher can't correct the students posture, grip etc? Not to mention they can't play together without lag.

I think you're missing the obvious problem here. It's because nothing can replace having another human in the same room as you when it comes to learning and feedback.

For a lot of instruments beginner lessons are not just giving instructions.

You might need to adjust posture for instance, and while you could spend 5 minutes explain it verbally in sequences of “move your left arm 5 degree up, no, up! slightly more to the left, your right arm moved down, bring it back[...]”; it’s just a poor experience and waste of time compared to in person moving their body to the right position (especially for kids).

Same if you want to check muscle tension or force them to only use some part of their body.

Why do we _need_ to figure that out? Humans _need_ real in person interaction for health. I don't want to live one hundred percent of my life remotely.

In person, a teacher can take your hand/arm and directly guide it into the right position. This just isn't possible remotely at all.

(Okay, if everybody had actual, sufficiently flexible physical robots in their homes...)

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