This article describes experiments conducted with the system and 3- to 5-year-old children. We highlight several dimensions of the study pertaining to music education, including attention span, spontaneous development of playing modes, and capacity to listen analytically. We describe very encouraging preliminary results and stress the importance of using reflective interactive systems for triggering musical interest in children and creating stimulating, nonsupervised music learning environments. We conclude by setting up our research in the context of the theory of flow as an optimal experience.

What happens when young children play with a virtual musician? The relationships between children and new technologies is a relevant topic in the field of music education (Webster 2002; Folkestad et al. 1998; Bamberger 2003) as well as in the field of psychological sciences (Turkle 1996, De Kerckhove 1991, Kenway, J. & Bullen 2004). However, only a few studies have considered the "nature " of the interaction between children and musical machine. A research project is carrying out dealing with the interaction between children and the Continuator, an innovative musical system elaborated at the SONY-Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, able to learn and produce music in the same style as the human playing the keyboard, like in a sound mirror (Pachet 2003). The results of the experiments carried out with children to 3-5 year old have shown that the Continuator, or other similar interactive reflective systems (IRMS), is able to develop interesting child/machine interaction and creative musical process in young 1

In this paper we will present a study carried out at the University of Bologna about young children working with a particular interactive system, the Continuator, created at the Sony-Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. We will describe the setting in which the observation took place and offer an analysis of two case-studies. We will show videos (7 minutes) and photos to illustrate some examples of interaction between children and the Continuator.

Many approaches have been proposed to develop and use software technology for musical education. However, the impact on actual musical pedagogy of these works is relatively poor. We claim that the main reason of this limited impact is the lack of collaboration between the system design and educational communities. Our project deals

Without touch, without seeing.

This paper addresses the issue of designing interactive systems that create flow experiences in users. I first describe an interactive musical system called the Continuator, which is able to learn the musical style of users in an agnostic, continuous fashion. I then describe experiments conducted with professional musicians and with 3 to 5-year old children and the Continuator. I show that these interactions are -- almost - typical of the Flow phenomenon, as introduced by Csikszentmihalyi. I then focus on the abstraction of the design principles behind the Continuator and propose the notion of Reflective Interactive System as a class of applications which trigger Flow experiences. Based on the analysis of the various psychological experiments conducted so far, I identify the issue of flexibility in interaction protocols as a crucial step to enhance the efficiency of Reflective Systems as we envisage them today.