This is by no means an in depth look at Chrome Music Lab. It’s worth a play, and I love to use this in the background to give my pupils something to play along with. The arrow on the right changes the style of the rhythms you work with, including how many beats per bar and instruments. it’s is really simple – you tap the dots to add a musical “note” and the characters play the notes! They also have little personalities which are really quirky and fun to watch. Rhythm is something I had actually thought about myself a while back, and I’m glad I found it in Google Music Lab. If you’re quick enough, you can screenshot a child’s work like above and keep a record for both art and music, it being a perfect example of graphic scoring and shape drawing. You can also change the sounds using the little colour circle at the bottom. This is a fabulous app for FP/KS1/EYFS children as it is so easy to access. The system then plays your shapes, with certain shapes developing faces and different sounds. Kandinsky is gloriously simple! You start with a totally blank canvas, and simply stroke shapes onto the page. We’ve used it to create QR codes which are then stuck into books, or on displays, for people to interact with. You can also save your work as a link, to share or revisit as you see fit. It’s a fantastic way of getting children to work with grids when making musical patterns, and the application for sequencing and pattern in maths is endless. The initial layout differs depending on the device being used, but you can change how many bars you work with, as well as tempo and sounds. Each note on the top grid is colourised to match used note colours, and the bottom grid uses circles or triangles to represent bass or snare sounds. The entire operation is touch based you touch a block to add sound, you touch it again to remove it. Song Maker is a really simple arrange screen setup which allows you to learn about and begin to create simple songs using some preset melodic and drum sounds. In this post, I will focus on three of the experiments: Song Maker, Kandinsky and Rhythm. Each one has applications in music, science and mathematics.

In total, there are 13 “experiments” to teach and learn with. Chrome Music Lab is one of those apps, and boy does it deliver in the classroom!

One of those things is creating quirky, innovative apps which just tick all of the right boxes. Google, for all of their all encompassing status, are great at many things. A little while back, I stumbled upon a hidden gem of the Internet:

Kandinsky music lab