Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

This “The Best…” list is a bit different from The Best Music Websites For Learning English.  That list is geared both to helping student learn common vocabulary related to music, and to also help students use the lyrics of songs for listening, comprehension, and vocabulary knowledge.

This list is focused on free sites where English Language Learners and other students can easily create their own music, primarily instrumental, and post it on their own or a teacher’s website.  Then, students can write and speak about why they composed it and listeners (as well as the composer) can share what it makes them visualize.

In addition to being free-of-charge, in order to make this site students must not be able to access inappropriate lyrics.  Because of that criteria, I’ve omitted many sites that allow you to mix popular songs and create your own digital “mixtapes.”

Most of these sites don’t require any registration.  However, those that do offer a quick-and-easy way to do so.

Finally, I have not listed these sites in any order of preference.

Here are my choices for The Best Online Sites For Creating Music:

The Minuet Mixer comes from the wonderful New York Philharmonic Game Room.  Students can create and play their own minuets.  The url for their compositions can be emailed and posted on a blog or online journal.

Once you go to Soundbadge, you have to answer several questions about yourself.  Based on the answers, a unique musical sound is created.  You can then email the url of your “soundbadge” and post it on a blog, website or online journal.

Contrapunctus Variations (what a name!) lets you create musical compositions with your computer mouse. It’s difficult to explain in a post, but once you go there it will become clear. You can save your composition, describe it, and email the link for posting in a blog or teacher’s website.  No registration is required.

With the Carol-Maker you can compose a never-heard-before mashup of strange grunts with classic Christmas songs, and email it to a friend (or enemy).

Here’s another site where you can make your own music – this time from The Make Your Own Music Game. Email your creation for posting on a website or blog.

You can compose your own song of musical animals sounds at Nim’s Island Animal Jukebox, and then email it to a friend or teacher for posting on a website or blog.

The Japanese Federation of Construction Contractors have created Build Up!. It lets you “build” a skyscraper of music made by construction tools. It’s pretty neat. Much of the site is in English, the part about emailing your creation is in Japanese, but just click on some things and you’ll figure it out.

Jam Studio and seems pretty easy to use. English Language Learners can very quickly compose a song, email and post the url.

I like two music games designed by a creative designer named Luke Whittaker. His latest creation is an amazing online video game called Sound Factory.  It’s very hard for me to explain.  Basically,  you role-play a man in a factory who get to create music.  That description, however, does not in any way do the game justice.  There are a lot of instructions given in simple English, and students can email their final musical creation after they’ve finished the game.  I also have listed the “Walkthrough” (answers) to the game on my website so students can doubly use it as a language development exercise. In A Break In The Road students can again create their own musical composition.  It’s not quite a game, but I won’t even attempt to describe it.  Check it out for yourself.

The I Know That Music Maker is easy to use, though it does require a simple registration.

The BBC has two nice tools to make music online — 6 Mixer and VJ Masher.

KissTunes is a great web tool that lets you make some music and lets you give it a name and describe it. Then, you get a url address for your creation where others can then leave comments. You don’t even need to register!

The only way I can explain Glitchscape is it lets you make boxes and then turns them into music. You then get the url address of your creation for posting on a blog or website. No registration is required.

As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

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