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The PiMu is geared towards musical composition.
Its surface allows you to create music by drawing patterns with gouache, modelling clay, fruit, thread…
Technical details :
– 24 configurable musical points
– Nano computer with 512MB RAM, 16gb storage, 1ghz allwinner processor.
– 2 speakers and in-line audio output
– 4-hour battery life.
The PiMu musical whiteboard was invented in May 2016, after educator Vitor Moreira realized that teaching music could be more fun and that children could be protagonists in the composition process.PiMu works through a circuit-closing system, in which paint is the connecting agent. Several musical points are scattered over its surface and can be activated using a special paint: the instrument’s built-in computer identifies the connected points and activates the sounds.
“After working on musicalization in formal education, I realized that children didn’t create, but reproduced. To create the PiMu, the main question was: how can we give people the means to create music without needing theory?
The educator is not unaware of the importance of music theory, but he doesn’t see it as paramount in students’ first contact with music. “I created PiMu with the idea of inverting teaching. We first give the condition to create art, and then the person feels committed to looking for the theory, because then they will see meaning and feel pleasure in learning it, in applying it to their creations,” he says.
We realize that teaching music is often flawed and time-consuming, because it teaches how to play music rather than how to think about music, thus bringing teaching closer to a training course in which the student repeats what he’s been taught, but doesn’t know what he’s actually doing.
For us, teaching music is similar to learning to speak: when we’re born, we learn to speak, and by the age of 5 we’re already able to express our ideas, talk about our tastes and desires, and it’s only at the age of 6 that we begin to learn writing and grammar.
In music, we find that the opposite is true: writing, notes and concepts are taught first, then the student learns to speak, which makes no sense to us.
So we invented PiMu based on the problems we see as a solution to make composing part of the first day of school, in a fun and playful way, and for students to identify with and feel proud of their work.
