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The 8 Best Electronic Music Toys for Kids
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The 8 Best Electronic Music Toys for Kids
Since my daughter was born six and a half years ago, she’s been surrounded by music, and I’d like to think that the immersion is paying off. Mu’s acid-house banger “Paris Hilton” was her first favorite song—fortunately, long before I had to worry about her deciphering the lyrics. We’ve listened to plenty of Frozen and Moana in the car, but we’ve spent even more time singing along to children’s folk singer Ella Jenkins, and lately she’s been amusing herself by learning the lyrical intricacies of Bill Callahan’s “Too Many Birds.” (What can I say; she’s a chip off the old block.)Get more news about children electronic music toy supplier,you can vist our website!
A big part of my daughter’s musical education has also involved making music. When she was just a year and a half old, we started doing Music Together classes, which I rate as one of the highlights of her first couple of years. And since she’s been old enough to bang on things, my wife and I have filled the house with toys and instruments, everything from the typical shakers and slide whistle to one of those musical playmats that you play with your feet, which she encountered at a party and absolutely had to have. (A word to the wise: They’re noisy, take up space in your closet, and your kid will get bored quickly—which is good, since they’re so damn noisy. I don’t recommend them.) In recent years, we’ve graduated to electronic instruments, in part because I’ve been playing with synthesizers since I was 16 and I want my kid to have everything that I did, and then some.
Fortunately, there’s been a recent explosion of synthesizers and other musical gadgets aimed expressly at kids. Some they can figure out on their own, some will require parental supervision, and some are so cool that even non-parents might end up wanting one for themselves.
The Blipblox is a curious, entrancing, and unique device. It’s essentially a kind of groovebox, yet you might just as well call it an infinity machine, because music pours out of it ceaselessly. The source of the sound is an onboard synth paired with a sequencer (that is, a device that plays back patterns of notes, in this case a constantly shifting series of pre-programmed ones); you manipulate the sound via a bevy of colorful knobs and levers that positively beg to be turned, twisted, pushed, and pulled, while drum settings let you add kick, snare, or beatbox patterns. Diagrammed arrows sketch out certain possibilities lurking within the signal chain, but they might as well be the dotted lines on a pirate’s map: Tap this, yoink on that, and see what happens. The makers have intentionally left the machine’s functions cryptic. Features like filter, waveform, and envelope shape—the basic building blocks of synthesis—remain unlabeled; this is a machine you learn by touch, not by reading the manual.Blipblox has its limitations. You can’t alter the preset sequences, and there’s no on-board keyboard to allow you to play notes. (You can, however, attach a keyboard controller via MIDI, the software protocol that allows electronic instruments to communicate data like tempo and pitch.) But there’s a reason for those design decisions: By keeping the sound flowing, it encourages hands-on play, rather than long pauses between hunting and pecking. Ultimately, the Blipblox may be more a toy than a bona fide musical instrument, but it can reward hours of exploratory play while teaching some of the elementary principles of basic (and not-so-basic!) synthesis. And the flashing lights will give kids the thrill of sitting at the helm of a spaceship.