Creativity Tools
Juilliard Music Adventure
Juilliard Music Adventure (Theatrix Interactive – ages 9 and up) takes place in an enchanted castle in a far-off land, where Gnoise (an evil gnome) has imprisoned the queen in her own amulet, and all sorts of musicians around the castle are having trouble making their music as a result. Pages from scores are missing, harmonicas are clogged, blacksmiths are not pounding in ear-pleasing unison; it’s your job to make everything right. You do this by using two tools which are also available without playing the “game” part of the disc, a melody tile-maker and a rhythm tile-maker. Tiles are this program’s way of making music visual, and while they are more precise and easier to use than the Macpaint-type device featured in Making Music, they are still not quite so intuitive as advertised. The best CD-ROM music studio we’ve yet seen is on Piano Discovery System (Vol.1, No. 12), but that’s pricey, and the one featured here is not half-bad, once you get used to it. The point of the disc is not so much to provide a studio as it is to educate about the basics of melody and rhythm through a series of simple challenges, on which score it succeeds admirably. The games are appropriate for children even younger than the recommended ages, and there are multiple levels of help available. Determined users can coax the tile-system into producing music snippets that range from classical to hip-hop, though it’s all MIDI.Other minor drawbacks include a Queen who becomes annoyingly gushy after awhile, and a program that occasionally slows down to a near-crawl – but you’re not using the Electric Ladyland studios here, so get used to it. Juilliard Music Adventure is fine starting point for aspiring musicians.
- March 1996
