www.exploratorium.edu/music

The Exploratorium’s Science of Music website won a Bronze award at the just ended American Association of Museums conference in Indianapolis. What is particularly unusual about this award, is that the Science of Music website was up against traditional 3-D museum exhibits.

Accidental Scientist: Music explores why some music give you goose bumps? Or if a tape recorder is an instrument? Why does your singing sound different in the shower? Questions like these, as well as a collection of unique interactive online exhibits, form the core of the Exploratorium Website, called The Accidental Scientist: Music, available at www.exploratorium.edu/music.

This site enables you to play with music, while lifting the lid on the underlying science. For example, visit a virtual kitchen and play its appliances, while exploring the relationship between visual cues and aural information. Swap out a kitchen clock for a metronome and then a crab to discover their similar timbres. Edit video of a step
dancer to compose music while experimenting with beat, tempo, polyrhythm, meter and phrasing. Explore why some beats and tempos go together and others don’t. Be a studio engineer, mixing such sounds as Afro-Cuban, Rockabilly and Electronica. Place the sounds near or far from one another, and find out what musicians in a live performance know. Or discover how some Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean instruments are adapted from everyday objects, and learn about the physics involved. In addition, look for an online multi-user drum circle, a playable virtual instrument, a video about the note A and much more.

The Accidental Scientist: Music is the second of a three-part project that focuses on the science beneath the activities you do every day. Accidental Scientist is funded by the National Science Foundation. Web technology made possible by Macromedia.