It’s just incredibly satisfying to be able to use a sequencer, or a drum machine, or to look at the fundamentals of sound: sound waves harmonics and, especially, the spectrogram, the moving picture of sound that shows you the frequencies that the sound is made up of. What excites you most about these experiments? It’s been really fun to see it evolve, and get to realize some of the ideas that I was playing around with in my research: tinkering with music in a new way.

We just started talking a little bit, and when I finished up at MIT, he pulled me in to work together with him on this project that was just beginning - about a year ago. That’s where I met Alex Chen, who’s part of Google Creative Lab. I got invited to present at Moogfest, which is this awesome music festival hosted by Moog.

My research is actually all about musical tinkerings: helping people learn by playing around with music technologies in order to make things. I graduated recently from MIT Media Lab, where I did my Ph.D.

How’d you get involved with this project? Inverse spoke with Eric Rosenbaum, who’s been with the project since, basically, its conception. The hope, here, is twofold: one, that people will get inspired by the act of creation two, that coders will take the open source code and make more awesome web-music tools. There are currently 12 experiments, all of which have open source code, and all of which are fantastic, instructional, worthwhile time-wasters. On Wednesday, Google released its Chrome Music Lab, an interactive way for people of all ages to both learn and create music.

Google chrome music lab