Abstract
The shamisen is a traditional Japanese folk musical instrument. It is regarded as a valuable cultural asset that might attract people into moving into unpopulated districts of the country. We focus on the Mutsumi-ryu style of shamisen, a famous playing style originating in Akita (a prefecture in northern Japan). Mutsumi-ryu has a characteristic action called the uchi, where a plectrum is struck down to the body and strings of the shamisen. In this paper, we propose a self-learning system for the uchi for students of the Mutsumi-ryu playing style by using Virtual Reality (VR). The system captures a student’s actions during uchi using a motion capture system, evaluates the student’s actions, and interactively represents the movements of an expert performing the uchi in a VR environment. Experimental results showed that using our system, students can acquire a skill level comparable to that of those who learn directly from human experts.
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Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Toshimitsu Ono, a teacher of the Mutsumi-ryu playing style, for his generous support. Hiroaki Katsura, emeritus professor at Akita University, gave insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank Shin Kosaka for insightful discussions. This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K16103.
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Shibata, T., Mitobe, K., Miura, T., Fujiwara, K., Saito, M., Tamamoto, H. (2016). Development of an Uchi Self-learning System for Mutsumi-ryu-style Shamisen Using VR Environment. In: Kubota, N., Kiguchi, K., Liu, H., Obo, T. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9835. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43518-3_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43518-3_35
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