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Chrome Music Lab

Page history last edited by Joshua Cantrell 8 years ago

Chrome Music Lab Review

by Joshua Cantrell

Description

Chrome Music Lab is a website for learning about and experimenting with music. It was created as an accessible destination for music education as part of Music in Our Schools month. It has twelve different experiments in it: rhythm, spectrogram, chords, sound waves, arpeggios, kandinsky, melody maker, voice spinner, harmonics, piano roll, oscillators, and strings. The project is a collaboration between musicians and coders and is all open-source. All that is required to use it is an internet browser and to use some of the features you will need a microphone.Virtual Piano Review Virtual Piano Review Ocenaudio Review

Access

Free. https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com

Sample Usage

rhythm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiQdsVNVHLU

song made using all the tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImjuIfqBzV8

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

Each tool has different styles, so make sure to explore each of them. Some of the pages show you hints when they are loading, such as kandinsky. While the page loads, it shows you the three different shapes you can make on the tool: line, circle, and triangle. One a few of the pages tell you what to do on the actual page, most of them leave it up to you to figure our, but they all have a question mark on the top right corner that will explain the tool.

What the Tool Does Well

Has a wide range of capabilities
Not only lets you experiment with prerecorded sounds, but will let you recorde audio as well
Not only gives you tools to experiment with music, but also teaches you about it
Visualizes audio in a nonabstract manner
It is open-source and can be used to make your own tools

What it Does Poorly

Does not give immediate instructions for each tool
Has limited styles in each tool
You are not able to record or share the sounds you create
Focuses more on learning about sound instead of making it
Not all of the functions always work perfectly- kandinsky's shape recognition does not always work

What happens when you...

The tool is focused on education and learning and not as much on the actual creation of music. It does not allow you to record or share your creations. In order to be able to record what you make you have to use separate software. For Macs you can use Soundflower, and for Windows you can use Audacity.