Q:

Making music digitally -- where should children start?

Digital musical instruments: How could children play with and learn, alongside traditional instruments?
And how do the ecosystems for making music in iOS, Android, and Windows tablet compare?

Virtual instruments, sequencers, sound editors. Accompanying yourself while singing; writing original compositions; making soundtracks for homemade videos ...

A:

This isn't a great answer if you just want your kids to make music, but if you want to use music making as a vehicle to teach the kids how to program then I'd take a look at Sonic Pi. The founder of that effort is Sam Aaron the guy behind Overtone, a Clojure dialect that overlays SuperCollider and turns it into an elegant live coding environment. The people working on Sonic Pi are putting a great deal of effort into integrating it into our Key Stage 3 curriculum (i.e. kids aged between 11 and 14) through both computing workshops and music lessons.

N.B. I recommended that they called it Blackbird Pi instead, but I was too late ;-)

