Playing with toys.

When I was nine years old, I went to a camp for gifted children-"nerd camp" according to my brother. We studied French in the mornings, and recess was for reading. Each day one camper would "show off" his or her special talent. The performances were videotaped and shown to an audience of parents at the end of the session, and made them wonder if "gifted" might've been a misnomer for their children.

My talent was playing the oboe. I played duets with my friend Erica (on clarinet) from our band book-the centerpiece of the program was a rousing rendition of "Mexican Hat Dance." Having an extra year of lessons under her belt, Erica played the main melody and I was in charge of the two-note ole! at the end of the phrase. She played beautifully, but the two notes that would come out of my plastic-reeded oboe were never quite right. They squeaked and honked. In the video, I give scornful looks to my oboe, as if the horrible noises coming out of the instrument were completely out of my control. In many ways they were.

The point of this story is that music-making was not always enjoyable for me when I was little. For many children, learning to play music is frustrating. When a child shows an interest in making sound-whether banging out wonderful tone clusters on the piano, singing along to records or spitting out chords on a harmonica-they are often plucked from their creative experimentation and sat down to learn about note values, pitches, scales, dynamics and harmony, difficult concepts that seem to stand in the way of making music.

While these components are a necessary part of any music education, they often take center stage and force kids to leave their innate esthetic sensibilities behind. Music, unlike the visual arts, places huge barriers in front of young people. The Toy Symphony project, brainchild of MIT Media Lab professor and composer Tod Machover, sets out to remedy this problem and encourage children to create and play sophisticated music with the help of several technological "toys."

Machover, an excitable inventor type, and his team of students at MIT created high-tech instruments for Toy Symphony: Beatbugs, small rhythm-building devices that can be networked to create complex rhythmic layers; the Music Shaper, a soft, malleable instrument that can be twisted, squeezed and pulled to change the expressive qualities of music; and the backbone of the project, the HyperScore, a computer program that allows one to structure pieces based on visual elements.

Armed with the new instruments, the Toy Symphony team traveled to Berlin, Dublin, Glasgow, Boston and now New York to run extended series of workshops with local children. They were taught how to use and play the instruments and how to create their own pieces of music on the HyperScore. Kids are selected from the workshops to perform at the concerts, showing off the new instruments in pieces like Gili Weinberg's intensely rhythmic Nerve for a network of Beatbugs, a brand new piece by wunderkind composer Natasha Sinha, and Tod Machover's own Toy Symphony that brings all of the elements together in a celebratory work.

While the children may be the stars of this concert, the music is anything but simplistic. Machover insists that it isn't a kiddie concert. The music is brought to life by the toys and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under the direction of Gil Rose. And if you want to have a go with the instruments yourself, there is an open house on Sunday afternoon that is free to the public.

Toy Symphony, Sat., May 17 at 7 p.m., Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, 212-945-0505, free.