The “Harmonic Walk” and Enactive Knowledge: an Assessment Report

The Harmonic Walk is an interactive, physical environment based on user’s motion detection and devoted to the study and practice of tonal harmony. When entering the rectangular floor surface within the application’s camera view, a user can actually walk inside the musical structure, causing a sound feedback depending on the occupied zone. We arranged a two masks projection set up to allow users to experience melodic segmentation and tonality harmonic space, and we planned two phase assessment sessions, submitting a 22 high school student group to various test conditions. Our findings demonstrate the high learning effectiveness of the Harmonic Walk application. Its ability to transfer abstract concepts in an enactive way, produces important improvement rates both for subjects who received explicit information and for subjects who didn’t.