Active Listening: Encouraging Sound Awareness Through Tangible Sonic Toys

This paper explores how sound-based tangible toys can encourage children to engage with sounds in their environment through active listening and collaboration with their peers. Twenty-eight children, aged 3 to 4.5 years old, explored sound in their environment through three toy prototypes. One toy focused on hearing sounds in relation to their environment; such as traffic and children playing. Another toy explored the recording and playback of their own sounds, being "caught" in a racket and blown out. The third toy explored a combination of shaking in sounds, stirring them to manipulate them, and pouring the mix out. This project uses a mixed-methods approach and is presented as a step towards further studies comparing toys with different approaches to sound.