TamTam

A music and sound exploration application for the OLPC

Preliminary page. This is a condensation of the talk given at OLPC in Boston on June 14th 2006.
First a picture of the interface:

The latest screenshot of the upcoming TamTam

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Goals

• Provide children with a culturally-informed environment for making music and sound on the OLPC;

• Provide an audio/music experience that is instantly rewarding for a musically naïve user;

• Provide a pathway to more sophisticated musical experiences;

• Provide a playable musical instrument with its own “sound”;

• Provide a dynamically adaptable learning environment that proposes simplicity and welcomes complexity;

• Use mesh networking to encourage collaborative music making;

• Introduce notions of audio and music programming.

TamTam uses CSound as its audio engine

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People

• Jean Piché
  
• Douglas Eck
  
• Olivier Bélanger
  
• Sean Wood
  
• James Bergstra
  
• Nathanaël Lécaudé
  
• Adrian Martin
• Eric Lamothe

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TamTam is an educational application

Music is often described as the purest form of mathematical representation, driven instinctively by the human mind. It connects between people in many ways, and offers ways for expressing non-verbal emotion. In that sense music is related to problem-solving and communication.

On a more practical level, TamTam helps explore and explain ideas connected with sequences, fractions, repetition, transposition, and representation, all of which are helpful for an intuitive understanding of mathematics and many aspects of scientific enquiry. In the realm of applied physics, TamTam proposes tools to explore the phenomenon of sound and show how the manipulation of physical quantities have a direct effect on what is heard. A child's first physics lab starts with making sounds.

Sounds

This section provides information on the sound bank that will be used in TamTam. In addition to the sound bank, users will be able to record short samples using the internal microphone of the OLPC computer.

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Development

• How to use TamTam1
• High-level overview
• Source repository
• Tasks
• Interaction guideline
• File Format Discussion

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IRC

We have a channel called #tam_tam on the Freenode network.

Links

Translation of this page in Portuguese.

External link to TamTam blog site [http://tamtam4olpc.wordpress.com/].

External link to a video of miniTamTam in action [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31L9qaxOrp0]

External link to a video of TamTam synthLab inaction [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwqt8NMT-zI]

External link to a video of OLPC computer and TamTam software [http://renard.effetdesurprise.qc.ca/article.php3?id_article=32]