Learning Sounding gestures

Non-visual senses can be used in toys to enhance and enrich the play experience. Previous research has shown that – especially for young children developing sensory-motor skills – exploration and play are two tightly linked activities: everything is new and needs to be “studied”, and playful behaviors emerge from active exploration. The main idea of this paper is to provide a new approach in designing and realizing objects that elicit this type of behavior and encourage exploration by providing dynamic, real-time haptic, tactile, auditory feedback depending on a child’s gestures, movements, and emitted sounds. These toys provide interaction based on the enactive para–digm, where multimodal feedback is intimately tied to action – i.e. the human is “in the loop”. Moreover, these musical toys will teach how to perform musical gestures.