Toy Symphony is an exciting new music-making project for kids. Using newly designed Music Toys, you can learn to perform and compose music easily and have a lot of fun, too! There are three Music Toys used for Toy Symphony, and all are enhanced with technology so that you can learn not only about the different aspects of music (melody, harmony, and rhythm) but also how to write music and perform on a musical instrument in an easy, fun way.

Toy Symphony is a project that will travel to different cities, involving local children and professional musicians in a week-long workshop that ends in a concert performance. At the final concert, children will play alongside professional musicians on stage, performing music that has been written by children and professional composers.

To learn more about the Music Toys, keep reading. We are developing online versions of these toys right now, so that every kid can play with them on their computers, whether at home or in the classroom. Be sure to check back for them in the near future.
Hold a Beatbug in one hand and bang it with the other. Make any rhythm you like, and the Beatbug will play it for you again and again. Now you can bend the antennae to change and improve your rhythm. When you feel you are ready, bang on the Beatbug and send your rhythm to a friend. Receive rhythms from other friends. You can improve them with your antennae, keep them if you like, or enter your own rhythm and send it away. This is fun because you never know when and what kind of rhythm you are going to get. The more friends your have to play with, the more fun it is to combine all of your rhythms into great rhythmic songs.
The Music Shapers are soft and squishy. They come in different shapes, such as balls, pyramids, wheels, and even butterflies. When you squeeze a Shaper you can influence and explore the music that it has inside. You can also add your own music and change it as you play along. Different colorful embroidered patterns around the Shapers show you where and how to squeeze. You can squeeze any pattern that you like, squeeze soft or squeeze hard, and the music will keep on changing. The more you play, the more you can hear and understand what each pattern does. This is where it really gets to be fun. In Toy Symphony you can even use Musical Shapers to change and add to the music of other players, such as flutists, clarinetists, and oboists, and perform with them in a new composition that was written especially for this concert.
HyperScore is a colorful sketchpad that lets you draw musical ideas. You can compose and listen to your own melodies in a special window and then map these melodies to different colored pens. By drawing with these pens,you can compose your own complete pieces of music, and by sketching and stretching the lines in your drawing, you can continue to shape and change your composition.