During our EdTech presentations, my fellow teacher candidates Erin, Izzy & Jordan shared Chrome Music Lab. This is a free suite of tools that enhance the accessibility of music through hands-on experiments. I’ve taken some time to look through it & identify a few very interesting applications.

A basic sequence prepared in the Song Maker app.

  • Composition: students can experiment with writing their own melodies using the highly-visual Song Maker, Melody Maker & Rhythm applications. I see a lot of potential for using this to practice question-answer (statement-antecedent) writing.
  • Harmonics/Physics of Sound: the Spectrogram, Sound Waves and Harmonics applications are useful visual demonstrations that can help clarify abstract concepts like timbre, the harmonic series and overtones.
  • Oscillators: a very basic introduction to synthesis, demonstrating the characteristics of different oscillator types (‘sawtooth’, ‘square’, etc.). Considering the ascent in popularity of electronic music and analogue/digital synthesis with youth, this represents a good opportunity for early exposure.

This Saturday, I already started loading up the Chrome Music Lab for some students awaiting their lessons. I think the suite offers an accessible and intuitive access point for a number of neat music topics.

-S