Company and product presentation: Hörbert is the first wooden MP3 player for children – for sustainability in the children’s room

Nürtingen, October 26, 2015. Children love music and stories. Music puts you in a good mood and promotes movement and creativity. Most children wish for their own playback device for their children’s room and parents value a durable and safe device.

hörbert is such a device, and it is made of wood. Thanks to its digital interior, it is not only insensitive to shocks, but also offers absolute safety in use, as there are no tripping hazards due to cable clutter or dangerous mains voltage thanks to battery operation. To protect sensitive children’s ears, there is a switchable volume limiter for the built-in high-quality speaker with excellent sound quality. With its large colorful buttons, hörbert is very easy for children to use, and loading the memory card is made easy by the included hörbert software for Windows or Mac. hörbert achieves a very long battery life with a set of batteries thanks to its energy-saving electronics. Parents can confidently give hörbert as a gift, as it is sustainably manufactured in Germany and coated with saliva-proof paint. Plasticizers have been completely avoided.

In the Museum of Modern Art in New York, hörbert is now also capturing the hearts of American children. In the MoMA Art Lab, children can experiment, discover, and experience with selected products. This makes modern and contemporary art tangible for children.

Product details at a glance:

• Innovative product with sustainability aspect
• Safe (no mains voltage, no tripping hazards)
• Insensitive to shocks during playback
• Robust and intuitive to use
• Top sound quality with switchable volume limiter
• Long runtime thanks to energy-saving electronics
• Simple software for loading the memory card
• Made in Germany from high-quality materials
• Customizable with individual engraving
• Delivered preloaded with 140 minutes of music and audio plays, including batteries
• Retail price: starting from 239 euros with free shipping

Hearing and understanding – Important steps in language development

Listening is a skill that needs to be learned and fostered. The information we receive through our ears is plentiful. But what is important, what is not? When we listen, we perceive the world more accurately and can understand it better. Children who can listen attentively are more alert, have better language skills, and expand their vocabulary. Social skills are also promoted because “listening to each other” requires empathy and respect.

Listening creates exciting images in the mind, stimulating creativity and imagination. You immerse yourself in the story and create your own images and emotions from it.

Even a baby in the womb can listen. It recognizes the mother’s voice and experiences the outside world through hearing only. This ability becomes even more important after birth because language development, reading, and writing are built on listening.

The first media children come into contact with are often audio media. Many children completely relax while listening to their audio plays and become absolutely calm. With the experiences heard – voices, sounds, music, noises – the child creates its individual “listening piece.” If the child has its own playback device, it can decide for itself which piece is right at the moment. Often, the child chooses exactly the topics that occupy them the most, such as: “I can do this on my own” or the themes of fear or friendship. Naturally, parents should make an age-appropriate selection. For younger children, it is advisable to choose shorter stories, as they only perceive parts of the audio play that they can currently understand. As children get older, it becomes easier for them to empathize with other characters, allowing them to follow longer and more complex plots.

As children’s auditory perception develops, balanced sound and limited volume are particularly important. The child should be able to discern nuances in music and audio plays, especially in spoken texts. Excessive volume must be avoided at all costs to prevent damage to the delicate hearing. Many plastic toys with their small speakers only reproduce unclear and distorted sounds. Surprisingly, good sound quality is rare in the field of audible children’s toys, even though hearing should be trained particularly in childhood.

(See also www.audiva.de/anwender-kinder-grundlagen-fuer-eltern.html

and https://www.stiftung-zuhoeren.de)

About the Company

The company WINZKI GmbH & Co. KG was founded in February 2011. The audio player is a development of the managing director and founder Rainer Brang. hörbert is manufactured in Germany from high-quality materials with a lot of manual work and is exported to several European countries and Switzerland from there. hörbert is receiving worldwide attention and was exhibited in the “MoMA Art Lab” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between October 2014 and August 2015.