Introduce Your Kids To Classical Music With Meet The Orchestra

This attractive iPad app will familiarize your child with all the sights and sounds of an orchestra.

Vide Infra Group has cleverly combined musical gameplay with educational values to arrive at a simple and excellent method of getting kids acquainted with classical music in Meet the Orchestra. In this app, children learn to recognize the name, sound and appearance of 20 musical instruments that comprise an orchestra in a colorful and nicely designed package.

The user will learn about the different sections of an orchestra and how to differentiate between the instruments, both visually and audibly. Furthermore, this app includes some of the very best pieces of classical music – from Bach to Chopin – performed by the various instruments and recorded in a studio by professional orchestral musicians.

Educating your kids about music at an early age

Meet the Orchestra is organized into two parts: learning and quizzes. The learning part introduces the user to the orchestra and the various instruments that it’s made up of. Upon entering the Learn part of the app, an image is presented with the four sections of the orchestra – percussion, brass, string and woodwind – along with a piano. By tapping the screen on one of the sections, an arrow will appear; tapping on the arrow brings up an image of the section of the orchestra the user selected, along with a frog dressed like a composer.

From there, simply tapping on one of the individual instruments will highlight it; the composer will tell you what it is, and pressing the arrow on the screen will play a short piece of classical music with that particular instrument. The audio quality of these pieces is excellent – they were fine-recorded in a professional studio by musicians from national symphonic orchestras. In the images below, I have simply selected the woodwind section of the orchestra before tapping on the bassoon to hear an example of classical music played with this instrument.

Children can learn at their own pace

Aside from the quality of the audio, another nice feature is that the interface allows children to go at their own pace in order to get accustomed to the different sounds the instruments make. Once the user has mastered the names and sounds of the instruments, the second part of the app should be entered. This Quiz part includes four different games based on the instruments themselves.

The first two quizzes – Find By Appearance and Find By Sound – help the user to develop skills in recognizing instruments. Each quiz contains a number of levels, and the difficulty of identifying the correct answers increases as the learning process progresses. After the user is comfortable in identifying instruments by sight and sound, they can move on to the Define Order quiz, which includes consecutive audio clips from different instruments – they must be identified in the correct order by tapping the screen. There’s also an image matching game for a bit of variety to sharpen the user’s mind.

All in all, Meet the Orchestra is a very well presented and straightforward app for parents who want to introduce their kids to classical music. It’s well-designed and offers a great introduction for kids to classical music and its accompanying instruments.

App Name	Meet the Orchestra	Developer	Vide Infra Group
Price	$1.99	Latest Update	December 29, 2011
User Age	All Ages	Category	Games
Size	68.0MB	OS	iOS 4. or later

All images captured from Meet the Orchestra

By Colm Barker
Editor with an interest in online publishing, interesting applications, and spreading ideas with smart media.