This synthesizer for preschoolers looks like fun for all ages

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/08/this-synthesizer-for-preschool.html

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I’ve noticed if you buy a child a toy keyboard they don’t learn to play Mozart, they usually just find all the different noises it makes until they get bored.

This is perfect for that.

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I am stoked to get this for our toddler.

I can’t believe I just said that.

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Excited to get one of these for my kid and not for me. Oh no, not at all for me. It’s for children after all… right?

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Your preschooler wants to make Kraftwerk covers

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This is so cool. I want one for our kid. She loves music. The sound quality seems good.
The problem I have with most musical toys for kids is the sound quality. We tested 10 toy xylophones before we found one that was in tune. The speakers on most of the music-playing toys are horrible. Loud with terrible sound quality. The kid doesn’t care, but we do.

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Well if the child is anything like me, they won’t get bored, they’ll develop a lifelong passion for making noises, with synths or with anything else.

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Synthesizers, pianos and treadmills are all effectively free in a great many American burbs and urbs. People will literally pay you to get rid of them.

But all the free synths I’ve recycled had a very high barrier to entry - controls and labels incomprehensible to anyone without mentoring or training. I puzzled over some of them for hours without learning very much! This thing, as gaudy and fisher-price as it may look, seems to have actually had some user interface design principles applied to it.

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reminiscent of the OP1 by Teenage Engineering, which is a lot more powerful than this, but a similar look/feel.

Tunes are not a little sinister. Reminds me of stuff by “The Residents”.

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It’s got the little speaker top center… but it’s also got speaker outputs. That’s adult territory!

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A highlight of my job is getting to hear large groups of kids randomly droning, squelching, and screeching with huge assortment of the Korg Little Bits Synth Kit. Every session is a unique experiment in avant garde electoaccoustic expressionism.

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Mozart, Merzbow… what’s the difference really?

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My personal policy is never to give children’s gifts that make any kind of noise
Well, for the children of people you like, sure, but it’s entirely acceptable to annoy your sibling by giving your niece/nephew an obnoxiously noisy toy :slight_smile:

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