Music-making and musical comprehension with robotic building blocks

Abstract

Being able to express oneself musically and experiment with music composition is traditionally determined by one's ability to play an actual instrument with a certain degree of craftsmanship. Lack of skills may cause difficulties for children and young people to experience the joy of musical creativity. This paper presents a project where modular robotics is used to create a platform for creative musical expression that allows users to experiment with musical genres without any prior musical knowledge or skills. The project is an example of how to create "intelligent learning material" for educational use. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.