Vibrato is an important aspect of music performance. Most instruments have natural vibrato or are typically played with artificial vibrato (such as the violin). However, learning to master vibrato can be challenging for young musicians. Objective feedback is helpful for musicians who either can’t hear themselves properly (as is the case with singers) or hear themselves in a biased way. We propose a tool that will enable musicians to measure and visualize their vibrato during their practice sessions. This vibrato tool will be a key component in a larger application called VocalEyes, which will provide feedback on multiple areas of musical performance.

Many existing applications provide feedback on pitch, rhythm, and volume. The most noteworthy of these are SmartMusic and Music Prodigy. To our knowledge, however, no commercial tools for vibrato are on the market. A research prototype called Tartini includes vibrato visualization, but the developer, Philip McLeod, only developed the algorithms and interface and did virtually no user testing. To our knowledge, it has never been used outside of a research setting. Our work will contribute by discovering what vibrato visualizations are most helpful for musicians.