Posted by Alex Chen, Coder and Designer, Google Creative Lab
This year, for Music in Our Schools Month, we wanted to help make learning about music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. We built a set of experiments that let anyone explore how music works. It’s called Chrome Music Lab, and you can check it out at g.co/musiclab.
The experiments all use the Web Audio API, an open web standard that lets you create and manipulate sound right in the browser. In Chrome Music Lab, we’re using Web Audio to create interactive drum machines, pianos, synthesizers, and more. A few experiments also let you use the microphone input in Chrome through WebRTC. This lets you use your own voice or real sounds around you as part of the experiment.
The web has always been a space for open collaboration. Many of these experiments use grassroots efforts such as Tone JS, a framework built on top of the Web Audio API that makes it even easier to build interactive music experiences in the browser.
We’re also providing open-source code. So if one of our experiments sparks an idea, check out our repository and start building your own.