This is part two of a list of over 35 free music games you can play online within your browser. Remember, chrome, firefox or edge are your best options. To go to part 1 please click here. Otherwise, scroll on down. (Scrollin’ scrollin’ scrollin’ to the tune of Raw Hide).
Chrome Music Lab
Chrome Music Lab features a series of free miniature musical exploration games based around various musical themes. These range from melody through to waveforms and the effects of fractions on musical strings. It presents a multitude of opportunities to explore multiple facets of music. Here are some ideas for exploring each part of the suite.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/
Chrome music lab rhythm
Chrome music lab rhythm is a simplified drum machine or rhythm step sequencer that is made cute through the addition of fun characters that animate to the rhythms. I like how this makes a visual connection between the rhythms and how they might be composed. In order you can make:• Triple or compound rhythms with two timpani and triangles with cute monkey characters who give each other awkward looks
- Duple rhythm with kick, snare and hi-hat and two horned alien characters
- Rhythms grouped in 5 with woodblocks and clave with more characters with horns and are those space suits? What’s with the horns?
- This one seems perfect for Afro-Latin groove in 6 using congas and cowbell with parrot style characters.
Chrome music lab melody maker
This browser-based game lets you make a short melody based on the major scale by clicking in little brick like rectangles. You can change the tempo and… that’s it. There are 8 rows of rectangles so you’re pretty limited with the scope of your melody. It’s great for imposing restrictions then I guess.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Melody-Maker/
Chrome music lab song maker
Song maker lets you make a melody but this time longer than melody maker, with more range and with percussion sounds added. It is a great free alternative to Morton Subotnick’s Pitch Painter app albeit much more limited in terms of instruments, tonality and more. It lets you paint sounds by dragging lines across a graph to create melodies but has the same problem of notes stacked close together as pitch painter. You can even enter notes by singing which is a great way to practice solfege.
It includes two horizontal lines at the bottom of the screen to create a drumbeat to accompany your melody. This is a great tool for learners to explore pitch by drawing shapes that become sounds and to create harmonies by stackig the squares on top of each other. You can change the instrument sounds, tempo, length, meter and more. You can also share the song you made..
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/
Chrome music lab oscillator
This teaches you about sound wave forms in synthesizers and the sounds they make. You can explore pitch by stretching the cute little characters to make the sound go higher and lower. It is a great introduction to sound synthesis. As you stretch or squash vertically the shape of the numbers representing the pitch are displayed in a line of code at the bottom of the screen. This activity could be used in conjunction with the Sound Waves and Harmonics modules to explain musical timbre as the character of instrument’s sounds can be seen using wave form graphs. There are cross curricular opportunities to connect math to music using numbers to represent pitches and the use of graphs in modeling sound wave shapes so if you are a teacher you could possibly appease the requests of admin or finally prove that math is relevant to those music students who just want to jam.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Oscillators/
Chrome music lab spectrogram
Want to see what your voice looks like when visualized by a spectrogram? This browser-based experience lets you sing into it to see your singing pitch visualized. It also lets you draw pitches on the screen and hear it. There are also a bunch of sound examples to look at.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Spectrogram/
Chrome Music Lab Chords
This features a piano keyboard. If you press any key it generates a major or minor chord from that note. It would be useful in testing your knowledge of chord spelling. You could try to guess the notes of a major chord from E and then find the answers by pressing the key. It would also be useful to show that chords are formed from every second note of a scale.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Chords/
Chrome Music Lab Sound Waves
This is an animation of how quickly sound waves move based on the pitch of the notes. It animates dots or a single line wave if you press the zoom button. This would be useful in demonstrating how octaves or intervals operate. If it included some measurement and ratios and ways to compare the waves it would be even more useful.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Sound-Waves/
Chrome Music Lab Arpeggios
This is the part of Chrome Lab that could be used as its own instrument. It offers a color coded circle of fifths with an inner wheel showing the associated relative minor keys. There are several different arpeggiations of chords you can swipe through from simple to complex. This is a great way to explore some chord progression using mixtures of only major and minor chords. It is a great tool for offering examples of how major and relative minor keys can sound when they modulate.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Arpeggios/
Chrome Music Lab Harmonics
This is a great accompaniment to the Sound Wave activity mentioned above. It is a great visual example of how the harmonic series works, beginning with halves that create the octave. It would be useful for explaining musical intervals such as octaves and instrument ranges. Harmonics are useful in explaining how instrument timbres are create through their combinations of harmonics.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Harmonics/
Chrome Music Lab Piano Roll
This relates well to Song Maker and Melody Maker. It’s a color coded MIDI piano roll. You could compare this tool to videos of old player piano rolls to contrast and compare. There are several classics that children can choose to see animated in the piano roll. The version of Beethoven’s 5th symphony would be effective to explain how melody operates as a combination of pitch and rhythm. Learners can see how the theme of triplet rhythm to a note a third below is repeated through the visual patterns formed in the graph like piano roll.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Piano-Roll/
Chrome music lab strings
Want to explore how different lengths of strings relate to pitch? Want to get all Pythagoras over ratios of string length and the pure intervals they create? Then you are in luck. You can finally understand what your math teacher never explained about how math and music are related.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Strings/
Chrome Music Lab Voice Spinner
This is a fun way to demonstrate how various sounds look in the waveform visual that is outputted when sounds are recorded digitally. You can play sounds backwards, faster, or slower which can be fun. For those oldies among us we can alienate our students by talking about the good old days of tape players and describe the sound of a Walkman running out of batteries.
https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Voice-Spinner/
NYU Mus Ed Lab
This collective of people is phenomenal. It is so exciting to learn of a whole organization dedicated to learning design in music education. So many great ideas exploding from this group. Here are a few of my favorites from their website
https://musedlab.org/
Groove Pizza
Continuing with circular representations of rhythm we have Groove Pizza. The ninja turtles would dig it. This engaging visualization of rhythm lets you arrange your rhythms around a circle or on a graph. It demonstrates the relationship between geometric shapes in a circle and rhythms and has a lot of ways you can change the parameters of the rhythm and sounds that play the rhythm. My favorite feature is its ability to share a link to what you have created which is useful for teachers to have students do things online (ahem, corona virus and online learning).
https://musedlab.org/groovepizza
Aqwertyon
This turns your computer keyboard into a keyboard, a musical keyboard you know like a piano, well a synthesizer to be exact. A synthesizer models the sounds of a range of electric and mechanical keyboards if you didn’t know. The name of this game is a combination of accordion and qwerty, the name of the typing layout of the computer keyboard.
The stroke of genius is the ability to set every key to a specific scale or mode. For example, in some of the preset videos you can play along with it matches the phrygian mode to a Missy Elliott song or a minor pentatonic scale to James Brown. There are a lot of possibilities here for exploring tonality and harmony and all with training wheels on for improvisation. Look mum, no wrong notes! Best yet you can share your badassery with friends!
https://musedlab.org/aqwertyon
Variation Playground
This series of online music games was commissioned by an orchestra to allow young people to interact with famous compositions in novel ways. They can play with form through altering phrase orders, with expression through changing ornamentation, tempo and dynamics and more. The design of these tools is quite an achievement, ranging from simple to complex interactions.
Benjamin Britten: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
This game presents you with the 4 main phrases of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. You can select from variations on each phrase that use changes in dynamics, tonality (major vs minor), tempo and ornamentation to create your own theme and variations. You can also change the order and number of each of the motif’s of the melody to create your own version of the composition. A useful tool for exploring form as well as many other elements of music. This browser-based game also lets you share your work with others.
https://apps.musedlab.org/variation-playground/cards/britten/?
Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Music of Two Worlds
By dragging up and down on the screen you can control the dynamics of the main theme of this famous work. You can start and stop and the piece as well by clicking on the window each time. The piece records all of the interactions you have with this browser-based game so you can share your performance with others. A great tool for exploring dynamics in a piece. You can also change the tonality of the theme by selecting between night and day icons.
https://apps.musedlab.org/variation-playground/paths/puck/?
Antonín Dvorak’s New World Symphony
This is another great browser-based game to explore form in music. You can combine various phrases from Dvorak’s piece either in order or altogether at once. The piece also lets you choose the number of times you repeat a section which is a fun way of learning about form by experimenting with it using parts of a famous work of classical music.
You can drag themes into the foreground or background to control how loud they appear compared to other parts. A fun way to experiment with dynamics in a piece. You can share what you make with others
https://apps.musedlab.org/variation-playground/layers/dvorak/?
Music of a Hero, Music of a Nation by Sibelius
Want to traverse mountains and have it affect music you’re making? This browser-based game is perfect for the musical mountaineer in you and I’m not talking about anything to do with the Julie Andrews or any Austrians. By dragging your finger or mouse around the picture you will affect the expressive elements of the music, namely ornamentation and dynamics. Your “performance” is recorded the whole time so you can share it with friends.
https://apps.musedlab.org/variation-playground/paths/sibelius/?
Music of a Hero, Music of a Nation by Sibelius
Want to traverse mountains and have it affect music you’re making? This browser-based game is perfect for the musical mountaineer in you and I’m not talking about anything to do with the Julie Andrews or any Austrians. By dragging your finger or mouse around the picture you will affect the expressive elements of the music, namely ornamentation and dynamics. Your “performance” is recorded the whole time so you can share it with friends.
https://apps.musedlab.org/variation-playground/paths/sibelius/?
Well there we go, we got there. I hope you had some fun thanks to the great people making javascript libraries dedicated to music in the browser.
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