26 Best Online Music Games For Classrooms 2024

Music is supposed to be fun. But there’s no denying that learning an instrument can take a long time. So, what can you do to enhance and enjoy the process more?

A great option for young students is online music games. Online music games can impart music theory knowledge and concepts – like rhythms, intervals, chord progressions, key signatures, and more – all while keeping it light, fun, and digestible.

There is no shortage of online music games, and while not all will be a great match for your classroom, you’re bound to find a few that will meet your criteria.

In this guide, we look at the best online music games for classrooms.

Incredibox

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Incredibox is a fun little game of musical exploration. First, you choose a character. Then, you get to choose different roles for seven singers / performers. They will each sing or play their assigned part, adding layers to the beat.

Although the game doesn’t teach you much about rhythm or melody, it does teach students how layers / tracks come together to form a whole. So, for a simple demonstration of multi-track recording and layering, it’s a neat little distraction.

Solfeg.io

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Solfeg.io is one of the top music education mobile apps for use at home and even in the classrooms.

Solfeg.io takes advantage of popular songs to teach vital music theory concepts using modern technology. Kids are already glued to tablets anyway – may as well have them learn something new!

This app is available for iOS and Android, and it makes the study of music very convenient, fun, and practical.

4four

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4four is a rhythm learning tool with various rhythm trainers, like Bar Ear, Type It, Call And Clap, and Rhythament, each of which find you practicing rhythms in a variety of ways, whether it’s listening to measures and matching them, typing rhythm symbols, or clapping the rhythm.

This game is quite basic, but it can also be gratifying.

Music Tech Teacher

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Music Tech Teacher isn’t a game unto itself – it’s home to a ton of games, worksheets, examples, quizzes, and more. Well worth bookmarking!

Whether it’s instruments, music notes, scales and intervals, rhythms, composers, or music tech, this resource represents a huge learning opportunity for your students.

Soundtrap

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Soundtrap isn’t an online music game, exactly. It’s more like an online collaboration platform and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or online music studio for making music together with friends.

But given how easy it is to use, you could easily incorporate it into your curriculum, maybe even split students up into groups to have them compose and record their own songs.

Even if your students don’t have any musical equipment, they can still take advantage of the built-in synthesizers, virtual instruments, loops and more to experiment, sketch out ideas, make their own beats, and even compose their own songs.

Of course, it would help if they had some prior musical experience before trying to make their own beats and songs.

For more advanced students who are interested in writing their own music, though, Soundtrap is a great tool to introduce them to.

Inside the Orchestra

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Inside the Orchestra is home to multiple categories of games and learning material – instruments, musical concepts, creative expression, just for fun, and holiday.

In the instruments section, students get to learn about strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, and how each of the instruments sound.

In the musical concepts section, one can test their knowledge with dynamics, highs and lows, musical maps, and pick the tempo.

In the creative expression section, students can explore composing a song, composing a beat, musical feelings, instruments, ocean sounds composition, phrase arranger, cymbals, and “pick the parts” of the Turkish March and 1812 Overture.

Overall, Inside the Orchestra’s games and activities are very basic.

Rhythm Plus

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Rhythm Plus is an online music game in the vein of Guitar Hero. The object is to play notes in time with the music as the prompts are given onscreen.

The player gets to choose from a myriad of songs. They may even be able to find some of their favorites, via Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons, The Weekend, and many others. You’ll also find K-pop and J-pop songs in their database.

The game is primarily played with the D, F, J, and K keys on your keyboard, and it can take some getting used to! Some of the songs are very difficult to follow along with. But for a bit of fun, it’s a great choice.

Fair warning – the music videos will play in the background as the player is engaging in the game, so it would be wise to monitor which songs your students pick to play. As we all know, music videos can be quite over the top nowadays!

Bemuse: BEAT MUSIC SEQUENCE

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Bemuse: BEAT MUSIC SEQUENCE is another rhythm game in the style of Guitar Hero. It is much slicker than Rhythm Plus, though, with a polished interface, loading screens, game-play, and more. It’s certainly not any easier, but that depends on how long it takes you to get used to the control scheme and which song you choose to play.

Their music database is eclectic, and you can choose from film scores, Japanese songs, Korean songs, and more.

SongTrivia2

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SongTrivia2 is a simple song identification game. You can choose from a variety of genres, be it pop, rock, alternative, rap & hip-hop, K-pop, or otherwise, to test your knowledge.

What’s great about it is that you can invite your friends to play with you and compete for the highest score.

Although it is a lot of fun, the game is in beta, and I’ve found it to be a little glitchy (you can’t always hear what music is being played to be able to guess the song). Once they’ve worked out the kinks, though, it’s sure to become a go-to favorite for memorization.

Heardle

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Heardle is a very simple game where you listen to the intro of the song and identify the correct artist and song title from a list of answer. Your goal is to answer in as few tries as possible, of course, but incorrect or skipped answers will unlock more of the intro so you can better identify the song.

There are new Heardles to challenge yourself with daily.

Song Maker

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Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker is like a simplified Soundtrap. Simply choose an instrument (marimba, piano, strings, woodwinds, or synth) and start placing notes on the grid. Song Maker also lets you draw in a beat, and you can choose from electronic, blocks, kit, or conga as your sound.

Basically, you get two layers of sounds – one instrument and one drum.

This is a simple and fun music composition tool anyone can learn to use to make their own beats. You can’t necessarily make complex beats with Song Maker, but it could be just right for those just getting started with musical creation.

BeepBox

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BeepBox is yet another simplistic music composition tool. It’s great for experimentation and for sketching out ideas quickly. Believe it or not, it comes with a ton of sounds to play with, and you can easily change the scale, key, tempo, and rhythm of the song to accommodate your needs.

One of the coolest things about BeepBox, though, is probably how you can customize the sound of instruments. You can design in detail, using settings like EQ filter, fade in/out, harmonics, sustain, unison, effects, chorus, and even envelopes. Wow!

Composer Fun

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Quia’s Composer Fun isn’t anything fancy. It’s basically like a game of Memory; except you’re looking to match up a composer with their works. But it sure isn’t easy, even if you know your stuff!

If you want to test your knowledge of composers and their works, then this is a great game to keep handy.

Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

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Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is an animated interactive game, with a story, voice acting, and more (somewhat reminiscent of classic CD-ROM games). It’s very nicely put together.

The game appears to be more reading than gameplay, mind you. One can learn a great deal of history in this game, but whether they will have any fun in the process is a whole other matter.

Audiotool

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Much like Soundtrap, Audiotool isn’t exactly a game. It’s more of an online digital music workstation (with a ton of great features).

Audiotool is free to use, doesn’t require installation, and it’s community oriented, encouraging the sharing of musical projects with creators at large (great for anyone who’s looking to get feedback on their musical works).

Audiotool comes loaded with a ton of great features, like a growing sample library, over 200,000 synthesizer presets, three drum machines, 28 FX including MIDI effects and mastering tools, and much more.

Different music production tools work differently, and if your students have never used Audiotool before, but have tried apps like GarageBand, Audiotool will have them thinking and exercising their creative muscles differently.

This is another great tool for introducing your students to the world of beat making, songwriting, and composition.

Orchestra Jigsaw

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Orchestra Jigsaw is a word search game where you hunt for orchestra related works amid a grid of gobbledygook. It’s a fun game, and it’s not too hard. But can you find every word? That’s a harder task than you might expect!

Orchestra Instrument Family

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Quia’s Orchestra Instrument Family is a simple game where you guess which family of instruments (brass, percussion, string, or woodwind) a specific instrument belongs to (e.g., oboe).

The game isn’t graphically enhanced or especially visually appealing, but it’s a good quiz for identifying what family orchestral instruments belong to.

Music Mania!

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Here’s another game via Quia. Music Mania! takes after the popular television quiz competition Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Music Mania! is graphically enhanced, and the questions do get harder as you progress through each level. If you know your orchestral instruments, you probably won’t struggle, but your knowledge would need to be relatively deep for you to be able to make it to the end.

Of course, in classic Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? fashion, you do get three hints to help you along.

(Or you can memorize the answers to the questions, because the game seems to come at you with the same set of questions every time.)

The questions are all connected to orchestral instruments (e.g., “Which of the following instrument has a double reed?”).

Name the Key Signature

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Whether you’ve been teaching key signatures, the circle of fifths, or some combination thereof, if you want your students to test their knowledge of key signatures, then Name the Key Signature is a straightforward game you can get them to try.

The game is simple, and there’s really nothing to it. Hit “Start,” and the game will prompt the user to identify the correct key signature (e.g., BMaj).

Theta Music Trainer

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Theta Music Trainer is home to a ton of ear training and music theory games. Students can learn about sound, pitch, rhythm, tonality, intervals, melody, and harmony, depending on the area you’d like them to focus on.

Here are but a few of the popular games available at Theta Music Trainer:

• Channel Scramble. Listen to a mix and identify the loudest instrument.
• Band Match. Listen and identify the instruments that are playing together.
• Pitch Compare. Compare two pitches being played on different instruments.
• Rhythm Repeat. Listen to a melody. Tap out the rhythm.

Note Values | Time Signatures

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The Note Values | Time Signatures game gives students the opportunity to test their knowledge of note values – whole, half, dotted half, quarter, dotted quarter, eighth, and more. This is essential knowledge for learning how to sight read, and a fun way to reinforce key concepts.

Cyber-Pattern Player

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Cyber-Pattern Player is like a simplistic drum machine. All you need to start making your own beats is to start placing your notes on the grid where you want them to sound.

There are some additional features built into the game, though. You can choose from five sound modes for some exciting variations. There are also four pre-made patterns for students to explore.

As an introduction to drum machines / sequencers, this is not a bad game.

Free game: Learn how to read music [Mobile friendly]

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The title of the game requires a little more creativity in our estimation, but Free game: Learn how to read music [Mobile friendly] is well-designed.

This game gives students the learn the treble clef, bass clef, C clef, and the Grand Staff (simply choose one to get started).

It’s a little bit like a rhythm game, overall, but for memorizing the staff, it’s not bad.

Online drum machine

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Musicca’s Online drum machine is a simplistic drum machine that lets students program their own beats with ease.

Students get to play with seven sounds, including hi-hat (foot), hi-hat, tom-tom, floor tom, ride cymbal, snare drum, and bass drum.

Further, the drum machine lets you adjust the tempo, engage swing mode, play with different time signatures, and play with preset patterns for pop, rock, jazz, funk, disco, hip-hop, and heavy metal.

drumbit | Online drum machine

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drumbit | Online drum machine dons the appearance of a classic drum machine console and it comes with most if not all the features you’d expect to find on one too! It may well be one of the best free online drum machines.

You can create your own beat using eight sounds – kick, snare, closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, bongo 1, bongo 2, wood, and crash (the sounds change based on the kit selected). You can change the volume and pan of each channel as you see fit.

There are controls for master volume, tempo, and swing (which you can change by amount). There are also a ton of kits to choose from, including jazz, hip-hop, beatbox, RnB, house, Drum & Bass, dubstep, Indian, Latin, FX kits, and more.

If that wasn’t enough, drumbit also comes with preset patterns, and a wide range of effects – reverb (room 1, room 2, medium hall 1, medium hall 2, large hall, spring reverb), muffler, studio, underground, telephone, intercom, low pass, high pass, and a compressor (which you can configure in detail) too.

With all this and more, drumbit can teach your students a great deal about making beats. There’s no education like practical experience!

Drum Machine online

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As with drumbit, OneMotion.com’s Drum Machine online dons the appearance of a classic drum machine console.

This drum machine has a different appearance and different controls compared to drumbit, but it’s still very impressive and competitive in its own way.

In Compose mode, you can draw your beats to a grid, just as you would be able to with most online drum machine games. You’ve got kick, snare, hi-hat, ride, crash, tom 1, tom 2, and tom 3 to work with in terms of sounds.

For each channel, you can configure velocity, bounce, pitch, echo, pan, shift, repeat, effect, cutoff, and cutoff R from a dropdown.

There’s also a master volume control, 22 kits to choose from, six reverb effects, effect level slider, pitch control, tempo, beats per bar, beat subdivision, and a shuffle / swing setting.

The kit styles include funk, jazz funk, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, 60s Ludwig, and more.

In Pads mode, you can play the kit using the numbers on your keyboard.

And in Explore mode, you can check out hundreds if not thousands of user creations and be inspired by them.

Again, there’s nothing quite like practical experience in learning how rhythm works, and how the different parts of a drumkit interact with each other. So, it should be a lot of fun watching what your students come up with using a drum machine like this one.

Top Online Music Games For Classrooms, Final Thoughts

As a teacher, it’s always a good idea to vet a game before giving it to your students to play with. For the most part, the games featured here are all good, clean fun, but their appropriateness will depend on the age of your students as well as the concepts you’re looking to reinforce right now.

Additionally, while some games encourage creativity and self-expression, many others focus on rote memorization and repetition. Both are important to learning, but it would be wise to mix things up every now and again, to keep your lessons engaging.

For the most part, online music games are great for reinforcing music theory concepts, instrument identification, composer history, rhythm, ear training, and more. But they don’t necessarily impart knowledge (most only test knowledge), so be sure to use them as supplemental tools, not as your curriculum!

With that, best of luck out there!