Matrixsynth points to this gem, from the US educational kids’ program 3-2-1 Contact, produced by Children’s Television Workshop. (I can’t think of any science programs today for young people quite like it, sadly. Ordinarily I’d hold off for Matrix’s wonderful Week in Synths, but I just can’t wait on this one. Good Sunday evening watching.)

Suzanne Ciani, the synthesis pioneer, multi-Grammy nominee, and composer of everything from New Age music to classic 70s jingles and sound effects (including the distinctive synthesized Coke-unbottling sound), explains the fundamentals of acoustics and synthesis in terms children could understand:

A Prophet figures prominently, but other than that it’s almost an all-Buchla show. She’s a virtuoso at patching a Buchla patch. And between her and the host, I guarantee you’ll be extremely calm within the first few seconds.

Interactive teething rings, YouTube, and traditional Japanese instruments don’t normally appear together, but here we go. Last week, we saw documentation on a system for hooking a teething ring sensor to a computer running interactive music software built in Max/MSP.

Teething Ring Max/MSP Musical Instrument for Babies

The creators have surfaced, and posted a video of the results. At first, the baby seems confused and even upset, but by the end of the video, we’ve got the world’s youngest electronic musician:

More details, photos, and even a CD release of music made by babies, for babies, at the project site:

Teething Ring Instrument

Co-designer Jo writes with more details of the project and an explanation of some of the traditional Japanese instruments (one designed specifically for infants) mentioned in the project paper:

Firmly in the “start ‘em young” category, the TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument) is designed to allow 0-3 year olds to create digital music in Max/MSP. Pressure from the baby’s mouth suckling at the teething ring is converted to MIDI messages and sent to a sound patch on a connected computer:

Pitch corresponds to the change of the sucking pressure. When the teething ring is strongly sucked, a higher note rings. The “basic part” consists of a simple 3 note C-major chord played melodically in the form of a simple musical scale. This is something the baby can identify and enjoy. In expansion part, the note changes with every suck. When the suck is repeated, ascent, descent are repeated. The change of the notes can be enjoyed even by the reflexive sucking motion. Therefore, this is ideal for use from the baby’s initial stage of growth.

TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument): A Design of the Sound Instrument for the Baby [Academic paper in PDF form; thanks, Patrick!]

The project is the creation of Naoko Kubo, Kazuhiro Jo, and Ken Matsunaga at the Science of Sound Culture department of the Kyushu Institute of Design. It’s not new, but this is the first I’ve seen it.

Interestingly, the all-Japanese design team opted for Western tonality. The “melody” application for the interface, according to the designers, is “intended for the young, somewhat cultured child accustomed to a certain degree to Western tonal music. When the baby begins to suck, a melody with the simple rhythm made on the basis of tonality structure of the Western tonal music begins to sound and stops when the sucking motion is finished.” I know many of us here are of the mind that the last thing babies need is more equal-tempered Western tonality, so fortunately at the end of the article the designers promise to experiment with Javanese pelog tuning or their indigenous Okinawan musical scales. (Patrick who sent in this link was looking up Okinawan scales.)

I’m equally curious about the children’s instruments the article mentions, though, the “garagara” and the “poppen”, which apparently are traditional Japanese musical toys for kids. Can anyone describe what these instruments are? Google curiously returns this image from Pokemon. That either means that the garagara is a cute little dinosaur, played by hitting the small creature in the head with his bone mallet Muppephone-style (whoo! I got to mention Muppephones twice in one week!), or the Pokemon is named for the musical instrument because all kids know what a garagara is! Regardless, this dinosaur is indeed cute.

Updated: Patrick sends details both on the apparent origins of this project, and the instruments in question:

The One Laptop Per Child initiative, aka “that $100 laptop” though it will initially cost more like $140, just got its first leg up. Nigeria has ordered one million of the custom Linux laptops. Now the big challenge will be whether the OLPC developers can deliver the machines on-budget and on time, given its wildly ambitious feature set. Interestingly, Intel and Microsoft, after publicly blasting the project as misguided, have each launched their own competing initiatives at significantly higher prices.

Nigeria Orders First Million OLPC Laptops at vnunet.com, which also has two videos of working prototypes; via worldchanging

For more background on the project, see The Laptop Crusade, from this month’s Wired.

See also our previous story, Creative, Networked Music Making on $100 One Laptop Per Child, which brought some interesting debate on all sides of this issue.

Beyond the idea of giving millions of children new access to computing, there’s a separate mission that’s come up: how to create useful music software for children. As covered in that previous article, a team of developers is working on new music software called TamTam that will have two lives: one, as creative musical software for the OLPC hardware, and a second, as open source software anyone can run. That means that even if you don’t agree with OLPC’s aims and implementation, TamTam could still have potential running on used laptops here in the US. (Given the problems of toxic computer waste, I’m just as interested in how we can recycle computers without short-shrifting children that receive them.)

Reader Nat Lécaudé, who initially brought TamTam to our attention, talks about working on the project:

Negroponte’s $100 One Laptop Per Child will include creative music making tools for children. Our friend Nathanael Lecaude writes us:

Just wanted to let you know what I was working on during the summer, we’re doing a sequencer/algorithmic music generator for the OLPC project. We did all the protoyping in Max and are now porting it to Python/GTK using Csound as the sound engine.

TamTam, music app on the OLPC Wiki

TamTam is intended both as an instrument in itself and an environment for learning music. It has basic sequencing and synthesis capabilities, presented in a child-friendly format. It’s also networked so children can play together. The sounds themselves will be influenced by the countries in which the OLPC will be distributed, with instruments of various kinds from Brazil, China, India, Thailand, and Nigeria. (I’m not sure how they’ll deal with tunings, but then, early in the Dutch occupation of what is now Indonesia, Javanese composers experimented with mixing the Pelog- and Slendro-tuned gamelan with Western marching band, an experiment my Javanese teacher later applied to Scottish bagpipes and gamelan. Anything is possible.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, as I could see it being useful internationally or other efforts being modeled on similar ideas.

For more technical background: Python is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language that’s unusually easy to learn. CSound is the powerful, free sound synthesis platform that’s shown up everywhere from experimental compositions to the guts of at least one karaoke machine (really).

See also:
Brad Fuller’s O’Reilly blog, which has a running commentary on OLPC (as well as insight on why operating systems are meaningless!)

MIT’s OLPC site and (importantly) OLPC wiki, which responds to at least some of the “why” questions discussed in comments on this story. Whether the OLPC initiative itself winds up living up to its goals, it seems to me that a cheap, accessible, open source sequencer for kids should be valuable regardless.

More on this issue: See our follow-up story, TamTam, Music Software for Kids, to be Fully Open Source; One Million OLPCs in Nigeria

In case you haven’t seen it yet, The New York Times reports today that New York-area schoolkids have resorted to an unusual solution to cellphone bans. Apparently unaware of phones’ vibrate mode, the students have opted for an incredibly annoying ringtone pitched at 17,000 Hz. Theoretically, “adults” shouldn’t be able to hear that. (The real issue is middle-aged adults, an ironic choice in New York schools where many of the faculty are younger.) I also think that’s a liberal estimate of hearing loss; while most people lose some of their high-end hearing as they age, the numbers from the private security firm quoted in the article seem a little odd — 12,000 Hz for a 50-year-old? I hope not! (Better cover your ears on the subways, huh?)

A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears [NYTimes.com; registration required and free story may expire]

The upshot of all of this is that there’s a free, if primitive, hearing test in the article (and presumably, all over the Web where these students are getting it). Hearing loss is a major problem; according to Aetna and the Harvard Medical School, 24% and 40% of adults over age 65 have difficulty hearing, and thirty percent of people over age 85 are deaf in at least one ear. For a better hearing test, here’s a free online example (I’m sure there are others online, and of course this does NOT substitute for a medical exam . . . nor can it measure just how annoying a kid with a cell phone can be):

Free Hearing Test

Anyone out there know what typical hearing loss figures are around middle age? (Lately, every time I write something some real experts show up out of nowhere, which is a pleasant experience!)

Poor Tia Thomas! Here’s a whiz kid who can spell ortstein, velocious, marmoreal, and totipalmate, and she has the misfortune to be eliminated from the National Spelling Bee on the word Theremin:

Theremin ends spelling bee contestant’s hopes [Theremin World]

(She guessed “Theramin”, which Theremin World’s Jason notes is a misspelling widely spread on eBay.) Heck, I don’t even know what those words mean, though I’ll be the World Wide Web knows, as it’s smarter than I am . . . Let’s see, totipalmate has to do with webbed feet, marmoreal means marble-like, as in, “that’s a very marmoreal Theremin case you’ve got there,” and ortstein means, um, “An indurated layer in the B horizon of Podzols in which the cementing material consists of illuviated sesquioxides and organic matter.” Try to use that in a sentence. Though I will say, Crazy Pete and the Illuviated Sesquioxides would make a killer band name.

No, let’s face it: our children are missing out on a proper Theremin education. We need children building Theremins in Physics class, fashioning gorgeous metal cases in shop, and studying the instrument’s rather elusive playing technique in extensive lessons and together in enormous choirs. (Wait, scratch that last idea, as that would throw off the calibration of the instrument . . . for chorus, they can all have Martenots.) I’m sure the Bush Administration would be game here in the U.S., since inventor Leon Theremin had a background in security and developing listening devices (for the KGB, but now we’re all on the same side). And developing listening devices and hidden microphones? Also more fun that most of what I did in school. I’m sure you’re more likely to run into a Theremin player than you are an indurated layer in the B horizon of Podzols.

Otherwise, there’s just no hope for the Tia Thomases of the world. And she, incidentally, I’m fairly certain of this, is a whole lot smarter than I am. Tia, if you’re out there and want a job as a copy editor, you know where to find us. (If I misspelled anything here, readers, do let me know.)

Children and young adults were everywhere at the NAMM show. They ranged from musically-inclined tots like the one shown here to teenage musical stars. And in addition to teaching musicianship and musical creativity, there’s a new emphasis on teaching them technology. Here’s a quick look at the latest efforts to bring music to a new generation of musicians.

If I ran a giant blogging empire like Weblogsinc or Gawker, I’d have to pimp my other sites right now, like “Here’s the hottest news from the Facial Tissues Blog” or something. I’m glad I don’t have such an empire, because instead we can waste productivity looking at this great stuff:

Tiny Tot Synth Lovers: More from the start ‘em young department: Synth recommendations at 18 months [Music thing], and circuit bending at age 6 [Get LoFi] . . . previously on CDM: 3 year-old DJs, child keyboard prodigy

I Want My Synth TV: Theremin videos [Theremin World], BBC Alchemists of Sound documentary [Get LoFi], and in my favorite Web cartoon, Strongbad gets a Key-Sword-Tar [Matrixsynth]

A Very Thereminy Christmas: Like CDM, Theremin World is in a holiday mood with a Christmas tree ornament, and John Waters performing holiday songs with Theremin

But Wait, There’s More! GetLoFi spots synths with tires, and Retro Thing honors the Alesis A6 Andromeda Analog Synth and suggests cheap bookshelf speakers.

Go forth, my children, and make sure that all of us become blocked domain names on your company’s network.

I asked for more wee tykes “creating digital music,” and here’s the first:

Excellent choice of synths, too: the Novation ReMote hooked up to what looks like Apple Logic Pro. No more information here, though this is on the Website of net label / artist community Experimedia. Keep practicing, Kayla, and you’ll be on the cover of Keyboard in no time. Oh, and I think there’s a song here: “Mothers, don’t let your kids grow up to be DJs.” Stick to the keyboards, kids.