Interactive reflexive and embodied exploration of sound qualities with BeSound

The embodied and reflexive interaction paradigms separately proved to be effective for learning music in childhood. However, nowadays, there is a scarcity of research addressing the joined adoption of these paradigms, both from a theoretical and a technological point of view. BeSound supports children to explore - by means of their own body - rhythm, melody, and harmony and to creatively combine them together. Firstly, the child is engaged in a game in which she has to mimic the movement of the characters of stories BeSound tells her; then she can ad-lib a music dialogue with the characters. Each character was previously associated with a component of Laban's Effort and it was described through a set of whole-body movement features. These features are automatically detected, analysed, and used to control the music response of BeSound.