Visua Musio

My kids have tried scores of artsy electronic music-generation apps, but Visua Musio is the only one that’s stuck. With a clean, friendly design, it allows kids to create sounds by placing shapes on four strings. The toy follows a comprehensible internal logic and uses simple animations to visualize each sound. The design is super minimalistic (yet not at all visually limited)—and fun. Each composition can be saved and shared but at least for my kids this isn’t really about sharing or saving work, but rather about the fun of hands-on interactive play. In the words of my son, “it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s Japanese.”

Visua was created by wowlab a Sendai, Japan-based unit of the WOW company, a digital multimedia studio.