25 August 2017

REVIEW: Soundmoovz

Music from movement.

Back when we took a trip around the 2017 London Toy Fair, one of the new toy gadgets that caught our eyes was Beatmoovz; small wearables that make sound when you move. Now re-branded as Soundmoovz, and finally available to buy, we strap a couple to ourselves and start moving.



In a nutshell, Soundmoovz are two small Bluetooth devices that feature a motion sensor. Attached to a soft silicone band, they can be worm either on the wrist or ankle, and connect to the Soundmoovz app for Android or iOS. In the app you can select a sound (not just a beat - hence the name change, we assume) to the bands, and start to move. Either you can rely on your phone or tablet's own speaker to provide the sound, or - as we did - hook  up either a wired or wireless speaker for oomph.



And that's basically it. Set up literally took a couple of minutes before we were kicking, punching, and gyrating around the house making... erm... well, not exactly music, but definitely sounds. The choice of beats and sound effects that come with the app is fairly varied, so you are able to select two sounds that are quite similar, but different, to create a drum-like beat. However, sounding at all decent will take lots of practice.


The Soundmoovz devices themselves seem to work very well, and once you learn how much of a movement you need to make to guarantee the sound (the sensitivity of each can be adjusted in the app), they are easy to play. We found that, even after mastering them on a certain sensitivity level, we still made mistakes, either by not moving enough, or by moving too much and losing the rhythm. Practice makes perfect, baby.


One feature that we really enjoyed was the non-musical sounds you can set the bands to make. The best by far were the robot noises, allowing us to stomp around being gigantic machines. Yeah, we love the simple things in life. If we're being honest, we had far more fun with the sound effects than we did with the music, as it was far easier to do, and a lot funnier to watch.


We were glad to see that the app can accept more than two Soundmoovz, so you could always buy two packs and have two devices on your wrists, and two on your ankles. That is, if you're a coordinated person who can both dance and make music. That we'd pay to see. You ain't seeing it round our gaff, though. No, just robots.

£49.99

Available from www.amazon.co.uk




© The Test Pit

This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services - Click here for information.

Site Layout Designed by pipdig