The Humming Box: AI-powered Tangible Music Toy for Children

Abstract

Music education benefits children s mental and intellectual development in early childhood. Guided by child-centered design principles, we propose the Humming Box,an AI-powered tangible music toy for 4-6-year-old children. The main goal of our project is to blend traditional hand crank music boxes with software-based music manipulation and create new possibilities for children to create and remix music manually. Our paper presents findings from 3 design sprints; each demonstrating playtest results and new design iterations. The user evaluation of our final design suggests that multimodal musical creation leads to increased engagement. We also discuss how the modular design of our toys functional components encourages creative expression and cooperative play.