Newly created technology-enhanced instruments can be supplementary tools for children's music education.

Most people love music, so they enjoy music by hearing and making it. However, our culture’s involvement with music is increasingly passive, not active. There are so many sounds which are around us. We can hear them anywhere like in schools, parks, theaters, phones and streets. People just can’t easily recognize their existence. Even though there is more music in our ordinary life, but fewer of us actually play music, sing music, or make our own music. Music rests in the periphery, like background wallpaper, tickling our senses but not engaging our intelligence.

Recent research demonstrates that we get more out of music if we absorb it, touch it, and shape it ourselves. This is especially important for children, since they are so well-suited to music-making (with boundless energy, emotional freedom, zeal to communicate, and flexible imagination); they often have no chance to create music because of music’s difficulties. The reason is that musical instruments are hard to play and take years to learn. Music notation is hard to read. Musical ‘language’ is specialized, and the complex rules of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, structure and form are only metaphorically connected to our common sense and day-to-day knowledge. These complex things make the children can’t create and enjoy music easily and even avoid learning it. Children get scared before they learn it because of those difficulties.

I also experienced these difficulties when I was learning playing the piano. At first, I was very excited about starting to learn playing the piano. However, I soon got many troubles. It was so hard to read complex notes and playing the piano at the same time. I used to grumble about piano lessons, and finally I had to quit it. It was very stressful and fearful experience.

What if we could unlock the expressive mysteries of music first, before learning the technical foundations, if we could help children ? and also others ? fall in love with the joys of music first. Once they found that creating music is so fascinating and not that difficult, they can learn and enjoy music fearlessly. For accomplish this, I come up with creating new instruments.

Moreover, the newly created technology enhanced instruments (Hyperinstruments) are not like musical toys that have been existed. There are electronic toy keyboards and games like Dance Dance Revolution. These are fun and attractive to play, but those are not real instruments. Children can’t create music freely with those tools. On the other hand, through using hyperinstruments, children or any other users can easily compose their own music, and express their own feeling. Hyperinstruments are not just providing fun, but also enable users actually create their own composition without any difficulties.

Music is a great way to engage young children because it is a natural and enjoyable part of their everyday lives. Children hear music or sing while watching television, riding in the car, at school, and as part of bedtime rituals. We often hear children creating their own songs and incorporating music in their play. Music is a socially engaging way to learn, and especially appropriate for the developmental levels of young children. Music supports self-expression, cooperative play, creativity, emotional well being, and development of social, cognitive, communication, and motor skills.

They learn music by doing music by interacting with musical material in meaningful ways as composers, performers and listeners. The challenge for me is to present children with appropriate objects, activities and situations to stimulate their natural creativity and enable them to express it freely.