Music should not be something inaccessible now that we have so much technology at our disposal. While not everything can be replaced with software, the possibilities of creating tools designed to facilitate learning and stimulate creativity are enormous. That vision leads us to the new Chrome Music Lab portal that Google has put online, where we will find several very entertaining musical experiments for novices and experts alike.
Are you interested in learning music? To be honest, locking yourself in a classroom and getting to know the theory up close is not as much of a priority as it might seem. After all, some of the most famous and talented musicians in the world did not even know how to "read music" so it is possible that a "traditional" learning path is not entirely suitable. I say this because the number of technological resources linked to music is increasingly wide, and I must add more economical. For example, a Novation Launchpad Mini board costs 99 dollars on the other side of the pond, and all you need to start using it is a bit of willpower combined with a handful of ideas. Now, where could those ideas come from? What about Google's new experiments portal?
The Mountain View giant prepared this series of experiments thinking about "Music in Our Schools Month", which covers the entire month of March in the United States, and as expected, its goal is to improve access to different learning elements. The technology behind this page combines Google Chrome itself with the Web Audio API, and a good dose of WebGL that delivers very high quality interactive content. Spectrograms, generators, oscillators, and even a voice mixer are part of Chrome Music Lab, all presented in an elegant and attractive way, especially for the little ones.
Obviously, it is recommended to use the latest stable version of Google Chrome in Music Lab, although with a bit of patience it is also possible to run the experiments in Firefox 45. To finish, a warning: The most popular tools dedicated to ad blocking on the Web break the functioning of the experiments, therefore, it is recommended to disable them.
Official site: Music Lab
