Visual Feedback for DDMM: A Simple Approach for Connecting and Synchronizing Unity Animations with Events from VST Plugins

Based on the issue that most musical instruments used in early music education encumber children with the additional difficulty of an unfamiliar and highly complex interface, we proposed an interactive system addressing and solving this problem. During our ongoing research project Drum-Dance-Music-Machine (DDMM) we developed a first prototypical implementation which provides a NIME for young children which we assume to be more simple and intuitive than classical instruments. First evaluation results show the success and validity of DDMM but also implicate that this should be further complemented with an additional visual component usable for feedback, motivation and guidance. Thus in this paper we describe the findings from our user studies and the inferred enhancements of Drum-Dance-Music-Machine, which have been realized by the creation of two gaming engine based animations including dancing and drumming avatars.