Music technology made easy

Making music helps to develop key areas of cognition, communication, focus and attention, auditory skills and working memory.

The more you can do, the more you can develop your skills - musical and social.

To do more of this, we wanted to share with you Chrome Music Lab, an online music-making platform with different ‘experiments’ exploring musical concepts and ideas.

Chrome Music Lab is great for creating music and learning the constructs of music such as pitch, rhythm and contours of melody. There are different sounds and activities available on the website, each exploring a different aspect of music.

Developing skills

We use these programs in a range of ways with a focus on developing

1. Executive functioning and in particular planning and organising skills

2. Visual tracking of colours and symbols and subsequent decision making

3. Sustaining attention on a musical task

4. Auditory perception and discrimination

5. Social interactions including collaboration and turn taking

6. Creative thinking and musical ability

This software is free and accessible via Chrome Experiments.

Ready to make some music?

Here are a few tips to help you start exploring the options in Chrome Music Lab:

• Shared Piano - share the link and play the piano online with friends and family

• Song Maker - click the squares and explore sequences of melody by colour

• Rhythm - click on the lines and spaces to create your own beats with shapes and colours

• Spectrogram - explores sound waves of pre-recorded sound and, record your own sounds using your computer microphone

If you need any help with the programs, don't hesitate to get in touch. And feel free to share your creations with us. We'd love to hear your music.

You might also like to view the resources in our blog post, Music, Play and Cognition. These can also be used with the different functions of Chrome Music Lab.