Photo by: Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash
Today some of our more musically inclined cohort members presented a Music Technology Toolkit they had put together. The resources ranged from speculative to interactive to practical and all but one are open source.
The speculative piece was an idea for an app for music students. It was modeled after Google Classroom but focused on music. There were spaces for quizzes, sheet music, ear training, submissions, warmups and more. Like Google Classroom it had different features for students and teachers. Overall I thought it would be a great resource for both music students and teachers and could potentially streamline the music classroom overall.
The interactive piece was a website called Chrome Music Lab and was my personal favorite discovery of the presentation. Music Lab is a very visual website that can help explain some potentially difficult musical concepts. As someone who has very little musical aptitude, this would have had a huge impact on me in high school. There are tools for learning rhythm, chords, and arpeggios. Tools to understand soundwaves, harmonics, and oscillators. It makes these things much more accessible to the average, non-musical, person.
Finally, there were a couple of different apps to scan sheet music. These made it easy to transcribe music onto other instruments and allowed you to separate different parts so you can listen to them individually. This would really help students learning a new song because they can isolate and play along with their parts or other parts as needed. These had a bit of a learning curve but there are other resources available to help learn the ins and outs.
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