When children reflect on their own playing style: The Continuator

The Continuator project concerns the study of interactive musical systems that have the capability to learn musical styles. The Continuator system was primarily developed with the goal of designing new musical instruments in the context of improvised music. The strong subjective impressions created by the use of the system led us to consider its use in a pedagogical context. This paper describes experiments conducted with the system and 3 to 5-year old children. We highlight several dimensions of the study pertaining to music education, including attention span, spontaneous development of playing modes and capacity to listen analytically. We describe very encouraging preliminary results and stress the importance of using reflective interactive systems for triggering musical interest in children and creating stimulating, non-supervised music learning environments. We conclude by setting up our research in the context of the theory of Flow as optimal experience.