This paper investigates how to design an embodied learning experience of a drumming teacher playing hand drums, to aid higher rhythm understanding and accuracy. By providing novices the first-person perspective of a drumming teacher while learning to play a West-African djembe drum, participants’ learning was measured objectively by their ability to follow the drumming teachers rhythms. Participants subjective learning was assessed through a self assessment questionnaire measuring aspects of flow, user-experience, oneness, and presence. Two test iterations were conducted. In both there was found no significance di erence in participants’ ability to follow the drumming teacher’ s tempo for the experimental group exposed to the first-person perspective of the teacher in a Virtual Reality (VR) drum lesson, versus the control group exposed to a 2D version of the stereoscopic drum lesson. There was sound a significant di erence in the experimental group’s presence scores in the first test iteration, and a significant difference in experimental group’ s oneness scores in the second test iteration. Participants’ subjective feelings indicated enjoyment and motivation to the presented learning technique in both groups.

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC2019); Malaga, Spain; 2019-05-28 - 2019-05-31