Research on the Application of Digital Piano Teaching Equipment in University Music Education Curriculum

Abstract

Driven by global higher-education digital transformation initiatives and policy-led calls for fair access to arts education resources, group-based piano instruction for university music majors is facing persistent structural hurdles. These include insufficient one-on-one instructor guidance, delayed feedback on student practice output, and uneven resource distribution across learner subgroups. Drawing from an integrated socio-pedagogical lens that merges the sociology of technology and critical arts-education thinking, this study frames intelligent digital piano instructional systems not merely as practical classroom gadgets, but as institutional intervention tools capable of reshaping fairness and overall quality within tertiary-level arts training. This work adopts a 16-week quasi-experimental controlled research setup. One hundred and twenty undergraduate learners majoring in music education and music performance took part as participants, who were randomly split into two cohorts. The experimental group received full support from an intelligent digital piano instructional platform, whereas the control group received conventional offline group lessons using only acoustic pianos. Five evaluation dimensions were constructed for cross-cohort quantitative comparison: academic learning outcomes, operational efficiency within classroom sessions, student self-directed learning engagement, fair access to teaching resources, and cross-group curriculum satisfaction survey results. Empirical outputs show that smart digital piano hardware helps mitigate achievement gaps stemming from limited instructor capacity and hardware shortages. Participants demonstrated improvements in piano execution proficiency, rhythmic precision, as well as independent artistic evaluative competence. Instructional interaction patterns between educators and students were also optimized, enabling more balanced deployment of premium music-teaching materials in classroom contexts. This paper further addresses practical drawbacks: over-reliance on automated corrective functions and imperfect acoustic timbre simulation built into digital instruments. Building on collected experimental evidence, layered improvement strategies are proposed, blending the strengths of digital intelligent infrastructure with human-centered offline mentorship. Findings offer cross-cultural insights for tertiary music education digital governance, equitable resource deployment and curriculum innovation from a social-science educational perspective.