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Creating Music
Pros: Sweet background drawings create a warm atmosphere for learning and experimenting with musical elements; games are simple but challenging enough for young musicians.
Cons: Some of the design is woefully dated and detracts from the quality of activities available.
Bottom Line: There's definitely enough here to keep kids musically engaged, and with a few tweaks, this website could really shine.
You can use this site as a nice warm-up for any music class or as a treat after a successful practice session. It definitely gets kids in a musical mindset, and young ones will have fun playing around and learning at the same time.
Created by Morton Subotnick, an electronic music pioneer with a long history in music education, Creating Music features a handful of simple games that teach basic concepts like pitch, rhythm, scales, and how different instruments sound. It also offers Musical Sketch Pads, a program where kids can "draw music" on a screen. Using a pencil icon, they'll click on an instrument, then begin drawing. The drawings are then "playable"; kids can hear what their art sounds like.
As for the design, well, some screens look like something your grandpa put together in 1994 and never updated, while others look fine. That is to say, it's not great, and may not impress today's media-savvy kiddos. However, other screens feature lovely hand-drawn backgrounds that are cute and engaging. It's a real mixed bag.
The games are simple and on target musically. Guidance is limited, and while most games are self-explanatory, a little written instruction would be nice. Also, the avatar for the coolest thing on the site, Musical Sketch Pads, says it doesn't work at this time (it's covered with a giant X) -- but we tried it, and it does seem to work on some browsers (though not all). Subotnick transformed Musical Sketch Pads into a pretty fantastic app called Morton Subotnick's Pitch Painter, which might be a better choice if you have access to iPads in the classroom.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Decent introduction to basic musical concepts.
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".
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