Musicca is a free music educational platform, providing lessons, exercises, and different interactive tools. Their goal is to help people across the world to learn skills essential for understanding music, reading music and playing an instrument. In this sixth blog post, I will research their platform and how they achieve their goal.
BACKGROUND
Musicca was founded in 2019 by Lasse Grubbe, a Danish musician with a Master of Arts in Musicology. It has its origin in Denmark, and is now one of the most popular music learning platforms in the world, according to their own website. They state that the platform has several million monthly users in more than 150 countries. Musicca has been multilingual from the very beginning, for the purpose of making music education freely accessible to everyone.
STRUCTURE
The content is divided into four sections: Exercises, Lessons, Tools and Dictionary. Each section is then divided into different categories, and each category contains different difficulty levels.
Exercises
There are in total 1 030 different exercises, starting on a relatively easy level. If the user already has some basic knowledge in music theory, there is also a possibility to move straight to more complex exercises. The layout is clean and the green color is used to reward the user when a task is completed. It is possible to do most of the exercises without any subscription or user, but to save the progress and skip advertisements it is necessary to create an account for free.
After completing a few exercises myself, I discovered that there is a wide variety in the cool and interesting tasks. The most complex exercises have a high difficulty level, which means that the platform can be used by well-trained musicians to develop their skills and theoretical knowledge further. Most of the exercises mainly focus on the piano as base instrument and reference to the notes.
Lessons
The lessons section is a collection of important music theory. The different chapters are connected to relevant exercises, so the user easily can practice simultaneously. The lessons are divided into the following categories: notes, the staff, clefs, accidentals, intervals, chords, scales and keys. They are supported by describing images and audio files, in addition to a short written explanation and some examples. The attached images are often photos of piano tiles with marked placement of the different tones. It is all well-structured and easy to read.
Tools
The tools section is a nice place to play around and have fun with different instruments and equipment. It is possible to play piano, guitar, bass and drums with different shortcuts, as well as using a chord player, drum machine, metronome and tuner. These are fun gadgets to experiment with, but could also be useful tools when making music and practicing other instruments. The tools page also has note, interval, chord and scale finders, and a chapter for circle of fifths and other musical terms.
Dictionary
The music dictionary contains over 1 000 terms from the world of music. The user can use it to look up difficult terms and navigate to info pages in an easy and effective way. It contains short explanations to different notes, chords, scales and other musical terms. To find them, the user can either enter a term in the search bar, or use the links in a side menu.
SUMMARY
Musicca is a great example of accessible and fun music education. The page is very informative for musicians on every level, as well as it gives the users a great opportunity to discover the fun parts of music. It is well organized and easy to use for newcomers, and the fact that it is for free is a great advantage. I absolutely think they achieve their goal to provide high-quality music education in a great way, and will consider using it in the future for personal music purposes.
Reference