Retell Lecture

The Skoog is a new university accessible musical instrument. It is designed to use by children or adults with special needs or in fact be used by anyone. It's soft, it's easy to play, it's robust and it can be customized to suit anyone's abilities. The Skoog helps students with special needs by allowing them to get involved in making music themselves. It's an instrument that they can play it and they can take ownership of and start creating their own sounds and music. Traditional instruments are the shape and size and made of the materials they are because of the sound that they need to make. If you want to make a sound like a plucked string, you need a string and it needs to be under tension, whereas with a Skoog, because it's a mixture of software and a sensor, then this the computer can handle making the sound. And so we can design an object that's designed to be touched and designed to be played with. In developing the screen and working with kids in the schools and in the classrooms, it’s really helped us make the Skoog something that's usable by the children themselves. They've informed us massively on how it needs to work and they've given their opinions on colours and designs. And just the feedback they've given to us has been just marvelous. It's just so enriching and it's really inspiring to actually work with these kids, particularly when you can provide them with an ability to start to playing their own music as opposed to just taking part through listening and listening to other musicians and really learning from.