Saturday, December 8, 2012

Making Music from Scratch

While American music school students whine about not having the right pitch-correction plug-in, a non-vintage Mexican-made Strat, or having to suffer with the indignity of small audiences, these students are creating music and community with "recycled instruments" (instruments made from landfill trash):



On the technology side, give a kid a computer and you might end up with something either surprising or terrifying: "We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

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