Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Multimedia Volume 2016, Article ID 4027164, 16 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/4027164 Research Article The Harmonic Walk: An Interactive Physical Environment to Learn Tonal Melody Accompaniment Marcella Mandanici, Antonio Rodà, and Sergio Canazza DepartmentofInformationEngineering,UniversityofPadova,ViaG.Gradenigo6/b,35131Padua,Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Marcella Mandanici;
[email protected] Received 7 July 2015; Accepted 9 December 2015 Academic Editor: Martin Reisslein Copyright © 2016 Marcella Mandanici et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Harmonic Walk is an interactive physical environment designed for learning and practicing the accompaniment of a tonal melody. Employing a highly innovative multimedia system, the application offers to the user the possibility of getting in touch with some fundamental tonal music features in a very simple and readily available way. Notwithstanding tonal music is very common in our lives, unskilled people as well as music students and even professionals are scarcely conscious of what these features actually are. The Harmonic Walk, through the body movement in space, can provide all these users a live experience of tonal melody structure, chords progressions, melody accompaniment, and improvisation. Enactive knowledge and embodied cognition allow the user to build an inner map of these musical features, which can be acted by moving on the active surface with a simple step. Thorough assessment tests with musicians and nonmusicians high school students could prove the high communicative power and efficiency of the Harmonic Walk application both in improving musical knowledge and in accomplishing complex musical tasks.