Flag beat: a novel interface for rhythmic musical expression for kids

This paper describes the development of a prototype of a sonic toy forpre-scholar kids. The device, which is a mod- ified version of a footballratchet, is based on the spinning gesture and it allows to experience fourdifferent types of auditory feedback. These algorithms let a kid play withmusic rhythm, generate a continuous sound feedback and control the pitch of apiece of music. An evaluation test of the device has been performed withfourteen kids in a kindergarten. Results and observations showed that kidspreferred the algorithms based on the exploration of the music rhythm and onpitch shifting.