AHs 2025 Purrfect Pitch: Learning Musical Intervals through Audio-Haptic Feedback

Learning to identify musical pitch intervals usually requires tedious rote practice. Purrfect Pitch offers a new approach: a wearable haptic vest that translates sound into touch. When users hear two musical notes, they simultaneously feel vibrations at corresponding vertical positions on their back—leveraging our natural "high/low" pitch metaphor. In a study with 18 participants, those using the audio-haptic system identified intervals 20% more accurately and 1.67 seconds faster than audio-only learners. However, the performance boost didn't persist after removing the haptic feedback, suggesting the vest enhances task performance but doesn't accelerate long-term skill acquisition. Sam Chin, Cathy Mengying Fang, Nikhil Singh, Ibrahim Ibrahim, Joe Paradiso, and Pattie Maes. 2025. Purrfect Pitch: Exploring Pitch Interval Learning through an Audio-Haptic Interface. In Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2025 (AHs '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745900.3746079