Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2017 12:32:49 -0700
From: Toby Schachman
Subject: Re: Beats of the World
While we're listing desiderata, others that came up yesterday:

"program by composing objects"
"a tour should involve printing something"
"take something home" (eg selfie)

Also something about having a thing you pick at the beginning that you carry around with you through the tour and use as you visit different activities... Not sure how to name the motivation behind this one but it's something about giving the guest agency.


For multiple people / recombination, the book could be in a binder (these tend to work nicely anyway cause pages lie flat without shadows) and then you could take out pages and mashup salsa and gamelan.

For editing the code you could point an editor at the page and tweak the tempo constant at the top.

Or maybe you could make a When /someone/ wishes /someone/ plays sound "sounds/clave.mp3" it would progress an animation to the next frame, so you could draw a cat that dances to the beat.


On Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
This is a great idea, and covers a lot of the territory that we want to demo.  (e.g., it's both an medium-for-learning and a creative environment.)  I wonder if we can mix in aspects of "multiple people at once", "move the book to a different table and/or recombine with another activity", and "edit the code".

(Also, every time I see "x of the world" I think of this.)


On Aug 26, 2017, at 11:45 AM, Toby Schachman wrote:

Yesterday Bret mentioned wanting to break guests out of the "tech demo" script and have some activities that guests could do themselves rather than just watch us do. Something more hands on.

I have a bunch of ideas for this that I'm excited to prototype with you all next week.

One that came up yesterday is the "beat recipe book". Like the La Tabla drum machine but more guided.

I was thinking we could make a book called Beats of the World.

Each spread is about a traditional rhythm (e.g. Salsa, Capoeira, Balinese gamelan, etc).

One page describes the culture around the rhythm: what instruments are used, its history, some pictures, etc.

On the facing page is a drum machine grid where the instruments are already there and there are light-colored cues that show you where to put your tokens. You'd fill in the grid progressively and hear how each instrument contributes to the beat. I found a web version of what the experience might sound like.

<image.png>

This way you can make the beat yourself (learn by doing), you can modify it, etc.

As icing on the cake, there's a printed map of the world that you pull out and put next to the book on the table. As you turn the pages, places in the world are highlighted that are mentioned in the history page for the beat (e.g. for Salsa, NYC, Puerto Rico, and Cuba would light up).

And once we can track a globe we can sub the globe in for the flat map.

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