#67

Yeah we use white noise for all home naps - I think it helps! I read especially when they are newborns because it sort of simulates an aspect of the environment in the womb, like rocking (or dramatically swinging in our case!). At first we were using this white noise app that had all these EQ features but I could never dial in a nice sound. Doing it in modular definitely crossed my mind for about .5 seconds until I got a grip (“all I’d need is a little skiff, a noise source, a filter, ok might as well add a vca and an lfo for subtle modulation, and a mixer to put some pure white noise back in…” and so on).

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#68

When my son was around a year old he was OBSESSED with people beatboxing. If I wasn’t doing it (badly) he would watch videos on YouTube. Young kids being into percussive vocal sounds is, in my personal experience, Definitely A Thing.

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#69

Interestingly none of the white noise/ambience phone apps (or just playing white noise on the hifi) worked.

But we had one of these for both kids (Eddie is now 1 and Alice is 3) and they worked a treat for both of them.

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Weird vocal sounds is definitely a thing. Ours love it. Makes sense that they would take an interest as their own speech when they do start talking develops at such a fast rate.

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#70

Hey folks,

I mainly make music with vcvrack and due to lockdown of course we’ve been spending lots of time at home. I recently tried making music with my daughter again. She’s 4 years old and it basically works like this:

I make some kind of easy and quick setup in vcv rack
She interacts with the hardware (microphone, instruments, keyboard)
We record everything
We listen back to it and make drawings while we listen

That’s it at the moment.

Anyway, we did some no pressure improvisation with a microphone in a drum yesterday and recorded this: https://lukaskalmar.bandcamp.com/album/mullo

I’m mostly wondering if any of you folks have different approaches for this, stories, maybe even stuff to show (off :wink:).

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#71

I’m interested in doing things like this. My son is 2 years 8 months and I can’t tell whether it’s too early for him to get much benefit out of it. I don’t really have any pedagogy for this stuff either, but I’m not really feeling the current situation where my gear is all stored safely away in bags/cases and he doesn’t even see it, because I only work on music when he’s sleeping.

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#72

3yo daughter is mostly interested in percussion, but lately I’ve had a mic -> zoia -> speaker setup that she loves. it’s extra fun for me because I can build vocal-friendly patches as she sings. she enjoys making “rainbows”, ie changing the color of each module.

we also have had this laying around for a few years, lots of immediate record/playback fun: https://www.brandnewnoise.com/collections/instruments/products/zoots-kalimba-with-audio-recorder-pitch-control-effect

thinking about a little drum set soon. in the meantime we have plenty of random toy/“real” percussion around the house, including a sparkly 60s bass drum + cymbal that I thrifted just prior to the pandemic. my wife is learning guitar now so she has been strumming the acoustic lately too.

looking forward to the end of lockdowns to get her back into group music class.

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#73

I really do miss the group music classes. They were so wonderful, and he was making such progress!

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#74

My daughter will be five in January. I always allowed her to touch/play all of my instruments. Most of them (guitars, amp, fx, tongue drum, eurorack setup) are in our living room. We don’t have a TV and limited screen time. So music and play is front and center in the living room. We replaced our salon table with a kids table + chairs. The chairs are little cubes. When put on a side I can sit on one as well. Very practical.

I got her some bright magenta cables last year, to patch with me on my eurorack. We love doing that together. Especially early in the morning, when the street is still asleep. She also loves the Soma Lyra-8. She clicked with it the minute I let her touch it. And she can play it very concentrated for a long time. Amazes me every time. I recorded quite some stuff we did together. Hope one day when I am gone, she’ll listen to that with a smile on her face.

Love the idea of drawing while listening. Will do that with her too. Thanks, great tip!

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#75

My son loves to do what he calles “aui-aui” (which translated would be something like up-up, though it’s mostly about how the words sound, not much about the meaning).
I usually just hook a mic up to some delays and he has a lot of fun with that, by obsessively repeating the words “aui-aui” an hearing them been repeated back to him.
Unfortunately he broke the mic now, so I need to get a new one (it was a crappy cheap one fortunately).

I really need to try this! Sounds great!

#76

New to this forum, but this thread caught my eye! Father of a 3-month-old here. Oddly enough, I started getting interested in modular synthesisers (and actually music at all) after baby came — must have been all that time I was spending awake at night holding him and surfing the web. I bought a Synthstrom Deluge to placate myself while I toyed with the idea of a bigger system, but so far it has worked for me to just focus on one item of equipment and play with it in the limited time I have. Intuitive controls help a lot too!

Also love the idea of playing music with children. I’ll definitely do that when he’s older. I have this on my wish list: https://dato.mu/ — I think Andrew Huang did a video on it a while back.

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#77

We have a Dato Duo. I find it really cool. We gave it to our kid when he was maybe a bit too young. Now that he’s almost 5 he’s getting much more fun out of it. I really like the shared playing concept. The only thing I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with is the fact that it’s very sequencer-dependant. In hindsight I have to say that something more gestural is probably more interesting for children. Since it’s easier for them to associate the action they perform with the sound they hear.

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#79

Wow, thanks for merging my thread with this one. I spent an hour last night reading through posts and I’m amazed at how many people here are living through similar situations.

I also noticed how as soon as the pandemic “officially” started, people stopped posting in the family thread. That’s life I guess, I had an introspective first months as well, necessarily spent a lot of time locked in at home, trying to figure out how to keep my daughter and myself sane and fed.
I didn’t even have proper speakers during that time and my music stuff was locked away in some basement, that was pretty depressing, but daughter and me were dancing a lot during that time.

I have this on my wish list: https://dato.mu/

I was looking for this! It seems like a lot of fun even though the instrument seems a bit limited sonically. Still too expensive for me. :frowning: We’ll propably get into doing our own DIY synths at some point, but I guess 4 years is too young for that. My daughter is pretty fascinated by turning the potentiometers on a little broken standalone oscillator I have, even though it doesn’t make a sound anymore. She bent a component, that was fun to explain to her. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone would be up to a monthly “family” challenge. Monthly, so there’s no pressure, and maybe with a very loose theme.

I’ll come up with something if people show interest.

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#80

Could be fun! What’s on your mind exactly?

#81

So a little update after my last post here :wink:
My son is not so interested in air drumming now but whenever he sees ukulele or guitar he gets overly excited. I let him “play” it but mostly it is just random strumming now (which is still progress from trying to break strings off guitar :D) I will be probably looking into instruments which can be given to kids to play on their own: I was thinking of maybe toy marimba and sometime in the future if family funds will allow a piano. What makes me incredibly happy is that he reacts very lively to music so hopefully it is a start of a lifelong journey together :wink:
Right now he tries to reach the stereo system and talks to it because Cocteau Twins are playing :smiley:

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#82

Well, since everyone seems to have a slightly different approach, I think the final format shouldn’t be too fixed. Could be recorded music, visual (drawing or video).

I’m making this up as I write, so bear with me.

Let’s say we have a monthly family challenge about a theme

January: Birds
This months challenge revolves around birds and everything associated with birds. Birdsong, flight, dinosaurs (rawr), eggs… whatever comes to your mind.

Participants could share whatever activities they decide to do with their kids/family in a dedicated thread, basically sharing experiences, things that worked, things that didn’t work out as planned, happy accidents, conversations, etc.

Let’s see what happens from that point onwards.

I’m super open to any suggestions. As I said, I’m just making this up as I write. :wink:

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#83

I really like Moog’s Animoog on an iOS tablet for this - it responds well to touch, there’s visualizations that correspond to what you’re doing, and it’s very hard to sound “bad” with it even if you’re a toddler just touching and swiping around at random. I’m cautious around giving him anything “game-like” with a screen so I’ve only showed it to him a few times, but he’s gotten a kick out of it. Older kids (5+?) would probably get a lot of mileage out of it. Bonus: you can hook up a Sensel Morph, Lumi, etc. to it for MPE, and then it really gets expressive.

#84

The last thing I’m going to put in my kid’s hands is a table of any kind. Really. It’s unavoidable on the long run of coruse, but If I can delay it as much as possible, I’ll do it.
It’s incredible how quickly they get completely hooked, I’ve seen that with many of our friend’s kids.
So yes, I’m also super cautios.
For some time I had a digital piano in the living room, and he really liked randomly banding on those keys. Unfortunately it wasn’t mine.

I really like where this is heading. It can really be something quite open, at least at the beginning.

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#85

Yeah, definitely a good point about tablets.

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#86

5?!? Oh, wow, time flies so fast!!

#87

Yeah, tell me about it… :slight_smile: