Toy Concert / A Music Technology Project for Children Keywords: - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Toy Concert / A Music Technology Project for Children Keywords: #Instrument #Toy #Instrumental Toy #Kids #Music #Education #Composition #Improvisation #Creati vity #Enjoy #HaveFun #Make some (funny) noise Contents: Who are we designing for?
Keywords: #Instrument #Toy #Instrumental Toy
#Kids #Music #Education #Composition #Improvisation #Creativity #Enjoy #HaveFun #Make some (funny) noise
Contents:
Who are we designing for? Why are we doing this within a slightly crowded market? What are the aims & how to achieve those? When & where - the potential context of use
At the beginning, the user group was identified as ‘kids around 8-12 years old who play instruments’ . The age group was chosen according to a similar project* carried out by a research group at MIT Media Lab. During research, however, EVERY parent I talked to told me that their kid(s) play some kind of instrument! For this reason, I went to a family, talked to the parents & the kid, dived into detailed issues in their daily life, and had a great time playing music with the little girl. Elsa is a character I have created mostly based on this little girl. Insights
research also informed the description of her life: family, education, personalities, interests, emotions, etc.
*Toy symphony: An International Music Technology Project For Children https://www.cs.tcd.ie/disciplines/information_systems/- crite/crite_web/publications/sources/ToySymphonyMEI-03.pdf
international primary school moved to UK with her family
lessons 8 years old violin (beginner)
Elsa is 8 years old. She’s an only
Italy to UK with her family, and now goes to an international primary school. She needs to learn Italian to communicate with her family, and also learns English to communicate with friends and teachers. There are so many things to learn and adapt to! And such pressure puts her family under a slightly tiring routine. She regularly goes to a violin class. Her teacher is very strict, con- stantly asking her to learn to play songs perfectly - pure replication & correction. To be honest, she’s a little bit bored.
giggles
when she makes weird & goofy noises with her violin
excitements
when she manages to use her violin bow to play her friend’s guitar when she says “oh, that sound is just like a fish jumping out of water!”
to her parents and asks them if they like it
boredom
a slightly boring routine (even on weekends / holidays)
stress
#learning languages #communication #homework
Elsa resembles her mother. She’s a bit shy to make new friends, and barely spares time to go outdoors. Her best friend is probably her kitten - oh, and she loves ani- mals! Despite the stressful, tiring and usually boring routine, she has her own little moments of giggles and excite-
menting and exploring small things. She chuckles when it doesn’t quite work, and her eyes will shine like stars upon her discoveries and creations - just like any kid in the world.
A love for animals Introverted & quiet
Every child is an artist. Adults can learn so much from their sponta- neity and intuitions. The problem is how to remain that innate talent throughout art education (in our case: music education) . We teach them about the rules in our adult world, and try to equip them with skills and theories. It seems, however, that it often takes too long and too much effort to get to that stage where they finally gain the freedom to express their thoughts and feelings. There are many products designed to help people learn, play and create
al user and so are too complex and unwieldy for the novice, or are too simplistic in their range and depth to allow for the sort of powerful musical experience which we might wish children to have.” (-ref: Toy Symphony)
Instrumental skills In-person / online
Lessons Books
Music Theories
Musical Education
for kids (and adults)
It is generally accepted that people interact with music in three approaches - listening, performing and composing. It is easy to find lessons to take and books to read nowadays - for all ages and skill levels. You can find resources to help improve & increase your music skills and knowledge, as well as those teaching you how to make music. You can listen to various types of music, learn to play certain songs, as well as try to write a song or jam along with a backing track. However, it seems that children’s musical education is often more on the training end and is less likely to encourage them to just experiment and explore. They’re asked to listen, exercise & replicate more often than to create - and they’re faced with intimidating things to understand and memorize.
Products
softwares & hardwares
There are already too many musical products
sional or for novice, for adults or for children. On the hardware (physical) end, there are plenty of physical products - either stand-alone instruments or gadgets that help with the learning process. On the software (virtual) end, it seems that there are even more products available. /* It is worth mentioning that children (adults) doesn’t necessarily corresponds to novice (pro- fessional) - skill & knowledge level would be a more appropriate parameter. Also, many software tools such as Garage Band are designed to be very friendly to novice as well, but they are usually more suitable for adults who have basic software skills and music common sense. */ T h i s i s
r p r
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Guitar Tabber Chordbuddy Jamstik CuBase Guitar Pro Garage Band Chrome Music Lab Fisher Price Schoenhut Figure Beatwave Little Tikes
hardware (physical) software (virtual) Adults and/or professional Children and/or novice
mini version colours&shapes
Musical Instruments
for kids
Let’s take a closer look at musical instruments for kids. To a large extent, they are ‘mini version’ of those instruments for adults. The range of possibilities is significantly reduced. For instance, a child can only hit 25 keys on a Schoenhut toy piano, compared to 88 keys on a regular piano. (Even worse, there are only 8 keys on a toy xylophone!) Moreover, the sound quality & accuracy of these toys are barely satisfactory. (e.g. the xylophone I bought was so poorly in tune that I slightly regret thinking of using it as a ‘prototype’ for testing.) As the child grow up and become more skilled & informed, they’ll soon find out that these products with such constraints can no longer satisfy their needs to venture wider and deeper into the music world.
The 3rd dimension: How much can I explore and learn?
It seemed that the market is pretty much satu- rated - with products spreading out all over the spectrums of skill levels and hardware/software - but something’s missing. If we take a closer look, we’ll notice that these products could be largely improved to provide children with much more powerful & long-lasting musical experience. Or: the 3rd dimension: How soon will I get bored of it? What the market looks like What the market is actually like
T h i s i s
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Fisher Price Schoenhut Little Tikes
Guitar players can grab their guitars, hang out with friends and enjoy a jamming session. They are able to share the melodies and rhythms in their minds to create pleasant experience, because they have enough skills and knowledge for improvisation. What if two kids can each carry a toy and share the notes & chords they could play easily, make some noise and have a laugh? What if we could lower the prerequisite, so that they don't need to wait to grow up and train themselves to be skilled enough to do so?
In order to achieve this, we could create a simplified musical instrument, remaining the range of possibilities and quality of sound that a real instrument would normally
hide the theories behind so that kids won't necessarily need to worry about them at this age, yet when they look back at some point they’ll realise: Oh, this is why it’s like this. There are several messages that we hope the product could convey. We hope that children will become more confident about their abilities that are often unrevealed, more comfortable to experiment and make mis- takes, more likely to enjoy creating some- thing new with someone else, and less afraid
high quality theories made easy playful experience
8 limited notes the circle of fifth: chords progression chords ‘similarity’ 12 half step wheel: a wider range
Imagine two children having a little ‘jamming session’ together, each holding one of these colourful little instru- ments in their hand. One of them will be in charge of the ‘rhythm’ (or: the chords progression). The other one will be hitting whatever notes they like - whether corresponding to the key/chords or not. As the ‘melody’ goes higher/lower, the sound outputs go clockwise/counterclockwise over the 12 half step wheel.
Chords!
Notes!
Rhythm Melody
It’s cool to create sth together
You’ll know it when you look back Go, explore and discover sth new
Rhythm Training A lower prerequisite Ooooops! loooool ... Ahh, I did it wrong again!
Time Pitch
Kid’s input Product output
We can train ourselves to have a good sense
why not skip that step (just for the moment) and see what we can do as if we already have that power? We can spend years studying music theories to know what notes/scales to play corre- sponding to certain chords/keys, but what if we are already provided with these possibili- ties that will naturally ‘sound good’ to the backing rhythm? What will we be able to create out of them? What if we could chuckle at a funny noise when we hit the ‘wrong’ note? To what extent do we need such guidance and auto-correction? When we become better at music, can we gradually remove these constraints and enjoy creating music with more freedom? You can do better than you think
Errors are acceptable
beautiful!
#Music as a language #Building connections for: Kids & kids Kids & Adults #we get closer when we create something together
Notes! + Chords! Different Languages (Musical & Verbal) Our mini concert One-to-one classes
We are from different cultures and education backgrounds, but now we can communicate our thoughts with an easy ‘language’ that we share in common. My classmates and I are so intrigued to try and see what noises we can make.
When my dad teaches me to play the guitar:
Instead of me being taught about the do’s and don’ts, can we play something together?
When I try to do some- thing new, my dad would stare at me like he knows I’m going to fail.
I wish he would let go of my hands, let me try to do something
How can I do this? Let’s play together! I always need daddy to be there. (At least it feels like) I can do it myself!
When we go on a family picnic:
I’ve always felt like we speak a different language from those grown-ups. I’m usually OK with that, but sometimes I wish they could understand what we’re doing and talking about.
‘Family picnic’ Our convo Those grown-ups’ convo Hey, would you join us?
/* This area is NOT intentionally left blank */ /* insert a time-table here summarising the research activities: when/where/what, takeaways, unaddressed issues etc. */
Can you guess why we call it ‘toy concert’ instead of ‘toy symphony’?