Instruments being created for non musical people supports the idea that sound should be accessible for everybody, having instruments that don’t heavily rely on technique helps eradicate the ownership that musicians have over sound, “Making collaborative interfaces relatively simple and easy to learn facilitates flow for novices.” (Blaine, T, Fels, S, Contexts Of Collaborative Musical Experiences, 2003, NIME).
The Stylophone, whilst used by serious musicians such as David Bowie and Kraftwerk, was popular in the UK toy market. If the Stylophone is simple enough for a child to use and enjoy, then anybody with a non musical background could make sense of how to operate it. The stylus makes it easy to produce tones whereas traditional instruments such as stringed instruments or brass instruments have physical limitations that prove difficult for people to learn such as the correct method to fret a string or the correct method to blow into the mouthpiece of a trumpet. The Stylophone only having 20 notes and being easy to use due to its stylus provides means for non musical people to explore melody, putting this in a collaborative setting allows for people to explore melodies together and harmonize with each other.
Creating a basic collaborative musical interface was important to me because I wanted to create a way for people of all musical skill to interact musically, making sound with somebody else in a fun context isn’t readily available to everybody and building an interface that allows for anybody to take part seemed like a prosocial decision.