Playing vibrotactile music: A comparison between the Vibrochord and a piano keyboard

• The tested framework appears to be valuable for evaluating digital musical interfaces.
• The Vibrochord is at least as suitable as the more familiar piano keyboard.
• The Vibrochord appears to facilitate more accurate playing.
• The larger key size of the Vibrochord does not inhibit participant's playing ability.

A novel vibrotactile musical input device called the Vibrochord, which is designed to deliver patterns of vibration to the skin, not to the ear, through the use of a vibrotactile display called the Emoti-Chair, is evaluated using proposed evaluation frameworks. Findings show that the mixture of frameworks used in this study provided valuable insight into the design of this novel musical device. Results obtained through the implementation of a mixture of these frameworks show that the Vibrochord facilitated an increased accuracy rate over the traditional piano keyboard, when inexperienced vibrotactile musicians tried to repeat vibrotactile patterns or “melodies”.