Online Xylophone
Pick a song and press Start. The bar to hit next glows — tap it and the song moves on, at your own pace.
Choose a song and press Start.
Pick a song and press Start. The bar to hit next glows — tap it and the song moves on, at your own pace.
Choose a song from the list and press Start. One bar lights up with a white ring — that is the next note. Hit it and the light jumps to the following note; hit a different bar and it simply sounds, the bar shakes, and the song waits for you. Nothing scrolls away while you search, so you can take as long as you need on each note. The strip above the instrument shows the next twelve notes in the same colors as the bars, which helps you see a run coming before you play it.
If a tune is new to you, switch to Listen first: the xylophone plays the whole song at the chosen speed and lights each bar as it sounds. Then go back to Play along. Free play turns off the guide completely — slide a finger across the bars for a glissando, or press several bars at once.
A real xylophone is long and low: the bars stand side by side, getting shorter from left to right. Squeezing fifteen of them across a phone held upright would leave each bar narrower than a fingertip, far too small to hit reliably. So on narrow screens the page rotates the instrument a quarter turn: the bars lie flat and stack from bottom (low C) to top (high C), still getting shorter as the pitch rises. Each bar becomes a wide strip that is easy to tap with a thumb.
Turn the phone sideways, or open the page on a tablet or computer, and the bars switch back to the traditional upright row. On a computer the letters on each bar show keyboard shortcuts: the A–J row plays the lower octave and Q–I plays the upper one.
There are no recordings on this page. Each note is synthesized on the spot by the Web Audio engine in your browser: a pure tone at the bar's pitch, a quieter overtone almost four times higher that gives wooden bars their bright knock, and a tiny burst of noise for the mallet. Higher bars ring for less time, just as short bars do on a real instrument. Because nothing has to download, the xylophone responds instantly and keeps working offline once the page has loaded.