Musical Me!
© 2011 Duck Duck Moose Inc.
Good for offering a playful introduction to basic musical concepts, namely pitch, rhythm and notes, this well designed app contains five games to explore. To move between the activities, you touch a mouse who flies to the next activity. There's a game of musical simon, where you listen to the notes and copy a pattern. A rhythm game lets you touch a stream of flying birds, each representing a note, to play a song. There's a rather random-feeling monster dancing game, and a rhythm activity where you can play along with a song by touching a drum, cymbals, triangle, maracas, egg shaker, or rubber duck. Our favorite activity is called "notes." It shows two bars of a treble clef line. Children can move the notes to hear the notes played and labeled instantly, resulting in a wonderful playful introduction to the mechanics of written music. The library of tunes consists of 15 simple tunes, either sung or played on cello or violin. These include Mary Had a Little Lamb, Skip to My Lou and so on. More voices would be nice, and in some activities background sounds, like water splashing, can become distracting. It would be nice to be able to adjust the volume of the background sounds. But this is a minor point. All in all, this $2 download is well worth the price. Visit http://tinyurl.com/musicalme.
iPad, iPhone
Teaches: music, notes, pitch, rhythm, instrument sounds, nomenclature
CTR Rating: 86%