Tangible music composer for children
Juan Ignacio Francesconi, Martín Leonardo Larrea, Cristina Manresa-Yee · Americanae (AECID Library) · 2013
Music education should start from an early age. Theo-ries of child development and learning emphasize the importance of manipulating physical objects. Music learning and teaching has traditionally been carried out mainly by visual and auditory activities. With this in mind, we combine music learning with tangible in-terfaces to stimulate senses toward music in children over six years old. We present a token+constraint tan-gible interface for children to learn musical skills such as musical notes, rhythm and the sound of different instruments. The work describes a low-cost tangi-ble interface addressed to children that allows learn-ing music in an intuitive, incremental and collabora-tive manner. The system recognizes in real-time pre-established patterns and associates them with musi-cal notes and instruments to allow composing music. The system was designed to be usable and to benefit from the advantages that tangible interfaces can pro-vide to children. Furthermore, it was implemented with low cost and easy to get tools and resources, such as wooden boards and a standard webcam.