Community reviews for Creating Music

This is a decent site for teaching basic musical concepts. I liked to use it for demonstrating and explaining some basic concepts like rhythm, pitch, and tempo. It is very limited though. In order for it to be more engaging it needs to provide more opportunities for students to create and experiment with their own music. Also the graphics are pretty "old school".

The site is outdated and could use new activities with updated graphics. I do like the explanation of pitch on the pitch page and the varying musical samples from culturally diverse repertoire on this page. There are some games that are incomplete (the playing with music page does not have a start button for the scale section). This is a would recommend only as an additional review of pitch concepts and with limited time spent by students on the site. They will get bored quickly and will also exhaust the usefulness of the site within one class period.The composition game is interesting but a bit convoluted and difficult to grasp for younger students.

Although the website has a lot of potential to explore and play with sounds, I wish it was more robust. I wish there was a web-based program, similar to the author's Pitch Painter app, that allowed students to not only interact with sounds but to create free-form music (similar to the Pitches & Rhythms game). The graphics on the site felt small at times and I wish you could select "full screen" to enlarge them. I think it is a valuable site for students who are starting to explore music and who may not have access to instruments at school or at home but I think the overall applications of the site are more for basic users.

There is just not enough content on this site. It has great potential but it needs work and some serious updating. I found that the old style of gaming on this site did make the kids lose interest quicker than I had hoped for. I did like the sight reading excepts from Beethoven compositions, however they should broaden this section and add more composers and their works.