Chrome Music Lab

Overview

Chrome Music Lab is an experimental music creation website made by Google. The site features a series of applications that allow users to learn about and play with sound, rhythm, melody, composition and more.

Online History

On March 9th, 2016, Google announced Chrome Music Lab on their blog, posting a series of experiments that allow people to play and create music on the web. ^[1] According to the post, they wrote, "the experiments are all built with the Web Audio API, a freely-accessible, open web standard that lets developers create and manipulate sound right in the browser. We’re also providing open-source code so that others can build new experiments based on what we’ve started."

That day, they released a video (shown below) to introduce the experiements. The video^[2] received more than 100,000 views in two years.

Features

Chrome Music Lab is a website that features a series of interactive "Experiments," with each one focusing on a different aspect of music.

Strings

Strings^[3] is an experiment that allows users to "explore the natural mathematical relationship between a string’s length and its pitch." When the user clicks and drags the cursor across the digital strings, various tones and pitches play.

Oscillators

Oscillators is a series of animated, anthropomorphic shapes that make various noises when clicked and dragged across the screen.

Piano Roll

Piano Roll is a digital player piano. The site describes it, "Originally, a piano roll was a roll of paper that you fed into a self-playing piano to make it play a piece. This experiment is inspired by piano rolls. You can watch the notes flow by, scrub it back and forth, and change the sounds."^[4]

Harmonics

Harmonics is an experiment to test how speed effects harmonic frequencies. Users can drag their mouse across the various frequencies to hear the differences.

Voice Spinner

Voice Spinner is a vocal recording experiment that allows users to change the pitch and speed of their own recorded voice. Users spin the digital wheel to hear the changes in pitch.

Melody Maker

Melody Maker is a digital grid that when users click the boxes, they can record, edit and play various notes.

Kandinsky

Kandisky combines drawing and music. Users draw on a blank canvas, and when they press the play button, a melody is played based upon where on the canvas the drawing sits. There is also a button to change the colors of the drawing, which changes the instruments that are playing.

Arpeggios

Arpeggios is designed to teach note names and how they build chords. Users click the note names and hear the musical scale associated with note name.

Sound Waves

Sound Waves features a digital keyboard that when pressed, a series of dots, representing sound waves, phyically moves. There is also the ability to zoom in to see a line connecting the dots.

Chords

Chords is a digital piano that, when a key is pressed, plays chords. Users can switch between major and minor chords to hear the difference.

Spectogram

Spectogram is an experiment that puts a picture to sounds. Users can drag their cursor over the screen to hear and see difference sounds, as well as select different instruments to see how they look when played.

Rhythms

Rhythms uses a series of digital characters to teach people about the patterns of sound in time. Click the grid to create different rhythms.

Song Maker

Song Maker allows users to click different notes on a grid to build a song. Users can also change the instruments, tempo and style of instrument used.

To launch Song Maker, Google posted a video about the experiment (shown below).

Search Interest

External References