What is your name and what is your involvement in e-learning?
Grace Oh with Musicshake, and I head our Musicshake for Education program.
What is Musicshake, and what is its mission and vision?
www.musicshake.com
Musicshake is a free to download, super user-friendly, music making program that anyone can use to make their own high quality music.You can create your own beats and tracks (hip hop, pop, electronica, rock, R&B, jazz, etc…) and even add your own voice! After you create your music, you can share with your friends and build a community around your own music.
Musicshake for Education – Unlike other existing difficult and boring music programs, Musicshake is fun and engaging. It is a great way to introduce students to music. Students can learn how every imaginable instrument sounds like, individually, and in combination with other instruments in every possible genre.If the goal of music education is not to make every student a Mozart or Beethoven, Musicshake is the best way to introduce music to today’s already overloaded students.
Who do you consider to be the target audience? Why?
Anyone without a formal music background, or any music beginner, is a part of our target audience. This would include most of the mass audience who only dream of creating their own music but can’t because they are not musicians. Musicshake is meant to educate people on the fundamentals of music, as well as include them in the music making process without the hassle of taking classes, buying instruments and practicing.
What makes Musicshake effective?
Musicshake contains categorized lists of every combination of all the imaginable music genres and instruments and offers over 550,000 different music samples.
An innovative algorithm (MuBot – Music Robot) sits at the background and recommends the optimal music pattern mix which allows users to simply listen, click, and select what they like. This means that you have 99.9% probability that whatever you make on Musicshake would sound very professional. In fact, our users have often told us that “you really have to try hard to make something that does not sound good.”
Have recent changes in the way online learners interact changed anything about Musicshake? (social networking, twitter, wikis, multimedia, voice boards, etc.)
Yes, they have greatly changed the way people use Musicshake and interact on Musicshake.com. We originally started as an online music making software but with the advances in virtual communities and social networks, saw the need to build a community based on user generated music. In order to address these market shifts, we are going after three distinct yet very interrelated markets – music creation, music consumption and user communities around user generated music.
Please list and describe a few key benefits of using Music Shake. Do you have any demos? (please provide links, and a jpeg or two, with captions)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_Dsrhtdjk – A feature done on us by G4 TV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_fPK8N8tKs – A presentation of Musicshake
The benefit of Musicshake is that you are able to create music exactly how you want it for your offline/online contents. If you are making your own YouTube video or your own Slide.com slideshow, why resort to a 3rd party music that doesn’t exactly match your contents? Why not make your own music for your own user generated contents? Traditionally, you had to be a musician to do this but Musicshake completely facilitates this.
Another key benefit – and one that is becoming more and more important these days – is that we have our own in-house musicians that have created all of the different over half a million different samples in our music library. We own all the copyrights to our music so we can grant our users the peace of mind of using Musicshake music for their own iMovies, DVDs, and anything else they may need music for, without worrying about any copyright infringement issues.
Unlike most software that requires license for both home and school usage, Musicshake is accessible from both home and school, if you have an internet connection.
Musicshake is also very competitively priced and special discounts are available for educational use. Please send an email to edu@musicshake.com for any inquiries.
We are also offering to your readers a free 3 month subscription for them, and any of their students, that they can learn more about by contacting edu@musicshake.com.
Please describe upcoming activities.
Musicshake continues to have fun and interesting events throughout the year for students. One promotion we are working on for a school is a “School Spirit Contest”! We are having students create a song for their school to promote school spirit. For other schools that are interested, we can also take any existing song and make into music blocks, which can then be remixed with the rest of the over 550,000 music blocks in Musicshake’s database.
Optional question: Do you see any applications of Musicshake for developing online courses for technical / professional development?
This is a great question. The answer is YES. In the future, we plan to develop a Musicshake Pro Version which would have more sophisticated functionalities and that would help even the professional musicians with their work. Once we have this version available, we can develop online course for technical and professional development.
For E-Learning Queen readers: When signing up with Musicshake at
http://eng.musicshake.com/Member/Join/, please use the following promo code “MUSICSHAKEPROMO3” to get 3 FREE mp3 free downloads.
(Note: The Innovators in E-Learning Series consists of interviews with who are working on projects that the E-Learning Queen readers might find interesting, useful, and inspiring. The questions are intended to enable readers to look at the products and services in a new way, and to encourage collaborative work and thinking. We welcome information about new products and services, and if they fit our readers' interests and needs, we may invite you to participate in an interview.)
