Using GarageBand is an obvious starting point, with its incredible instrument design and simple way of playing traditional instruments in ways that can give students immediate success in generating perfect strums on a guitar or chords on a piano. With the classes of children with autism I've worked with, my colleagues and I have brought music into the classroom with iPads in a variety of ways. I love the idea that in the same way that young musicians once created folk music out of having access to guitars hanging around the house, so too is this generation of young musicians creating a new folk music from their iPad, introducing new sounds and musical ideas into the world and broadening our aural palette in the process. Swiping a finger across a matrix of colourful lines, or pinching a tract of blue space, or shaking an abstract shape, can create wonderful sounds that would be impossible to explore in any other way. The iPad is particularly strong in providing musical instruments that can be played in a multi-sensory way that engage visual, tactile and proprioceptive sensory feedback on top of auditory processing. For my own part I particularly enjoy experimental music and ideas associated with organising noise into musical structures, with particular resonance to the way that young children can create and enjoy sounds that might not typically be associated with pure harmony. One of the subjects we keep returning to is music - we both love music and realise the value it has in our own daughter's life, the way that singing and dancing and a sense of joy associated with rhythm and melody contribute to the fluency of our waking hours. My wife is working in an early childhood environment at the moment, and we've been talking about the type of creative iPad pedagogy that can be applied to the learning interests of very young children.

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