A is for Amp

Twenty-six real things from a working studio.

No cartoon animals and no invented words. A crossfader is called a crossfader, and it is explained in seven words a one-year-old can hear, and then again, properly, for the adult reading it for the three hundredth time.

The book

A 32-page board book, 178 mm square, matt-laminated, rounded corners, printed on 1.5 mm board so it survives being chewed. One letter per page. The last four pages are for the grown-up: the age ladder, the reasoning, and what each of the twenty-six things actually does.

Status

Print-ready and out for quotation. The ISBN is being issued by Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia. If you want to know when it exists, write to hello@syncprimitive.com with the word AMP in the subject.

The interactive version

The same twenty-six objects on screen, with the illustrations, a sound for each, and optional spoken narration in whichever of the four registers matches her age. It is deliberately slow: it says the word, and then it waits.

Toddlers do learn words from a screen, but only when the screen is contingent, that is, when it responds to what they do. In a controlled comparison, children learned new verbs from live interaction and from live video chat, and did not learn them from a recording that merely looked interactive¹. So this one waits for a tap before it goes on, and it never autoplays.

Open the alphabet →

On screens, plainly

The WHO advises no screen time at all for children under one, and very little under five; the AAP's position on the under-twos is similar, with video chat the named exception. We agree with them. This screen version exists for the times you are not in the same room as her, and it is meant to be used with an adult, not instead of one. The book is the product. See the evidence page for the exact wording of both guidelines.

The twenty-six

Column three is what you read to her. Column four is what it means, and is printed at the back of the book.

	Word	Read aloud	What it actually is
A	Amp	The box that makes it loud.	An amplifier takes a signal too small to hear and adds power to it without changing its shape.
B	Bass	So low you feel it in your tummy.	Frequencies below about 250 hertz. Below roughly 20 hertz you stop hearing them and start feeling them.
C	Crossfader	Slide it there, then slide it back.	One fader, two channels. It turns one down as it turns the other up; scratch DJs cut with the first millimetre of its travel.
D	Dubplate	One record, cut for one night only.	A one-off record cut on a lathe into soft acetate. It sounds glorious and wears out in about a hundred plays.
E	Echo	It says it, then says it smaller.	A delayed copy of a sound. Set the delay to the right interval and the repeats fall in step with the beat.
F	Fader	Push it up and the sound gets bigger.	A slider that sets level. Audio faders are logarithmic, because human hearing is.
G	Gain	The same sound, quiet then louder.	How much a signal is amplified before anything else touches it. Set it wrong at the start and nothing downstream can fix it.
H	Hi-hat	Two little cymbals kissing.	Two cymbals on a stand, opened and closed by a pedal. In four-four the hats usually land between the beats, which is what makes you nod.
I	Intro	The quiet bit before the loud bit.	The opening section, built so another record can be mixed underneath it. Usually a plain drum pattern, thirty-two bars long.
J	Jack	The plug on the end of the wire.	The connector on the end of a cable. The quarter-inch jack has been in use since telephone switchboards in the 1870s.
K	Kick	The big heartbeat under everything.	The bass drum. In house and techno it lands on every beat; four kicks to the bar is where four on the floor comes from.
L	Loop	The bit that comes round again.	A section of audio set to repeat seamlessly. Put the start and the end on the beat and the join disappears.
M	Monitor	The speaker that tells the truth.	A speaker built to be accurate rather than flattering. If a mix holds up on a monitor it should hold up anywhere.
N	Needle	It listens to the little groove.	The stylus. A diamond tip a few thousandths of a millimetre wide, riding a groove and turning wiggles into voltage.
O	Oscillator	Where every sound is born.	A circuit that repeats a waveform at a chosen frequency. Every synthesised sound starts as one.
P	Pitch	The note goes up, and up.	How high or low a note is; the frequency of the wave. Double the frequency and you have gone up one octave.
Q	Queue	The next record, waiting its turn.	The record you have lined up next, and the headphone channel that lets you hear it before anyone else does.
R	Reverb	The sound of a very big room.	Thousands of reflections arriving just after the sound itself. The bigger the room, the longer they take to die away.
S	Snare	The clap on two and on four.	A drum with wires stretched under the lower head. They rattle when it is struck, which is why it cuts through everything.
T	Tempo	One, two, three, four.	The speed of the music, counted in beats per minute. Most techno sits between 125 and 140.
U	Unison	Two of the same, side by side.	Two or more voices playing the same note. Detune them very slightly and the sound gets wider.
V	Vinyl	A black circle full of music.	A spiral groove pressed into plastic. The wiggles in the wall of the groove are the waveform itself, at actual size.
W	Wave	Every sound is really a wave.	Sound is air pressure rising and falling. Draw that over time and you have drawn the sound.
X	XLR	The cable with three little pins.	A three-pin connector carrying a balanced signal, so it can run a long way without picking up hum.
Y	Y-cable	One goes in and two come out.	A splitter. One signal in, two out, so two things can hear the same source.
Z	Zero	Where the needle rests when it is done.	The mark on a level meter where the signal is as loud as it can get before it distorts.

Why these words

Three reasons, and none of them is that they are cute.

They are real. A child who learns "oscillator" at four has learned a thing that exists, and the word will still be true at twenty.
They cover the sound space. The twenty-six words between them carry most of the English consonant inventory in initial position, which is what makes the third register work when she gets to it.
The adult can bear them. You will read this book several hundred times. The design brief was that the reader should still find something in it on the hundredth pass, because a book that the adult avoids is a book that produces no turns at all.

Sources on this page

1Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn LanguageRoseberry, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, Child Development, 2014
doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12166