LooperDooper
LooperDooper can help pretty much anyone make music including disabled musicians and those with special educational needs.
LooperDooper can help pretty much anyone make music including disabled musicians and those with special educational needs. It was co-designed by students and staff members at three special schools in the South-West of England as part of Listening Aloud, a research and development project funded by Youth Music, Cardiff Metropolitan University and the MUSE Project.
Here is a wonderful video of the software being used by Georgia, one of the young people taking part in the project.
As can be seen, LooperDooper has been designed to be a really simple way of recording and playing back sounds using switches or a touchscreen on a computer. It’s great for capturing the sounds that kids make in school with a microphone – whatever those sounds might be – and then turning them into music. Recording with LooperDooper is about layering sounds on top of each other and playing them back in loops (sounds that go round and round and round and round…). This very simple idea results in some incredibly varied and exciting musical experiences, music that is entirely owned by the participating musicians.
You can download a full copy of LooperDooper for both Windows and Mac from the MUSE Project website, and it's free!