Music & Coding: Song Maker
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It’s exciting to find how things I love relate to each other. For me, it’s music and coding—I play guitar, sing, and love experimenting with technology. So, when I discovered Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker, I was immediately hooked. This tool bridges the worlds of music and technology in such an exciting way, allowing students to code their own tunes—even if they’ve never picked up an instrument before. Imagine turning simple dots into melodies—that’s the kind of magic that Song Maker brings to the classroom.
Song Maker is just one of the 14 experiments in Chrome Music Lab, a browser-based platform created by Google’s Creative Lab. It’s designed to make music learning interactive and accessible for everyone. With these experiments, students can explore sound in creative ways, like visualizing audio as colorful spectrograms, remixing recordings, or building their own rhythms. But it doesn’t stop there. Google offers even more tools for creative exploration, like Word Synth, which turns speech into music; Paint with Music, where every brushstroke creates a sound; or Blob Opera, a playful tool that lets you conduct a virtual choir. These tools aren’t just fun—they spark curiosity and creativity, blending technology and the arts in unique ways.
One great way to get students hooked on Song Maker is by starting with activities that are creative and engaging. I like to begin by having them draw shapes on the staff, where each pattern produces a unique noise, turning shapes into sounds. Another fun activity challenges students to become musical detectives by completing a familiar tune with missing notes. These tasks sharpen their critical thinking and listening skills while helping them understand musical patterns and structure.
Connecting Music & Coding in Song Maker
Music and technology have been intertwined for longer than many realize. A fascinating example is the player piano, a marvel of mechanical engineering from the early 1900s. These self-playing instruments used perforated paper rolls to control the keys and produce music. Each hole in the roll represented a note, and as the machine read the roll, it pressed the corresponding piano keys to play a piece of music. The system was an early example of how patterns and encoded instructions could bring music to life.
The legacy of player pianos lives on in tools like Song Maker
The legacy of player pianos lives on in tools like Song Maker. With a visual interface, students compose by dragging and dropping squares to represent notes, much like punching holes in a player piano roll. The dots’ positions determine pitch, and their spacing controls tempo—mirroring how player pianos transformed encoded instructions into music. To deepen understanding, introduce the connection to binary systems by showing Stanford’s player piano roll collection from the Lesson Slideshow, highlighting how holes represent played notes and blank spaces signify rests, just as ones and zeros power computers. These parallels reveal how Song Maker unites coding and music in a simple yet powerful way.
Before starting a structured activity, let students experiment freely for a few minutes. Encourage them to explore different instruments, tempos, and settings to discover the range of possibilities. Remind them to reset the tool after each session—either by reloading the page or restarting Song Maker—to keep their canvas fresh for new ideas. With these connections and a bit of experimentation, students will see how coding and music share the same creative DNA, making learning both accessible and exciting.
Music Shapes: Turning Visuals into Sound
The Music Shape activity is a fantastic way to get students exploring the connection between visuals and sound using Song Maker. It starts with a simple task: students create a shape using Song Maker’s notes, then describe the sounds that shape produces. This activity works especially well on computers with touchscreens, making it easier to draw shapes and interact with the tool.
The Music Shape Worksheet includes 17 pre-designed shapes for students to recreate in Song Maker, plus space for them to design three of their own. After creating a shape, students transfer it to the worksheet either by using Google Docs’ drawing tool (Insert → Drawing → New) or by taking a screenshot of their Song Maker creation. This flexibility ensures that students can focus on creativity rather than getting stuck on tech challenges.
What makes this activity shine is how it pushes students to think critically and creatively about sound. While they enjoy experimenting with shapes and notes, their initial sound descriptions are often generic. To encourage richer language, I’ve added a word bank of descriptive sound terms to the worksheet. This list can be adapted based on your students’ age or even created collaboratively as part of the activity. Students can also compare their sound shapes to familiar noises, like chirping birds or rushing water, to make their descriptions more vivid.
After completing the worksheet, bring the class together to listen to the sound shapes and share their descriptions. Ask students why they chose certain words and how different shapes influenced the sounds they created. This discussion is a wonderful opportunity to introduce musical concepts like harmony, discord, rhythm, and tone. The Music Shape activity isn’t just about making fun sounds—it’s a hands-on way to build students’ creativity, vocabulary, and understanding of how visual patterns can translate into auditory experiences.
Finish that Tune! Connecting Music and Coding
The Finish That Tune! activity in Song Maker turns students into musical detectives as they tackle incomplete melodies and fill in the missing notes. Starting with the classic tune Mary Had a Little Lamb, the class works together to uncover the gaps. Teachers can use the complete version of the melody, included on the worksheet, to guide students. Alternating between playing the full and incomplete versions helps highlight the missing notes, giving students a clear reference point. Some students even discover a creative solution: working in pairs on separate computers, playing both versions side by side to identify the missing elements.
This activity is more than just fun—it builds critical listening, problem-solving, and musical awareness. It also introduces students to the concept of sequentiality, a key principle shared by music and coding. In music, every note follows the next in a specific order to create a complete tune. Similarly, coding requires commands to be executed in the right sequence to achieve the desired outcome. Imagine leaving out a note in a melody—it feels incomplete, just as a program with missing steps won’t function properly.
To make this connection clear, draw parallels to coding tasks, like creating a square in Scratch. If the code tells the computer to draw only three sides, the square will remain unfinished—just like a melody missing a note. Through Finish That Tune!, students not only enhance their understanding of music but also strengthen their grasp of coding concepts, making it a perfect bridge between the arts and technology.
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